The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009) | Hacker News Reader

The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

stackoverflow.blog

209 pointsyellowyacht447 comments

It's kind of amusing that the entire premise of this article is undone by the aside:

> update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized.

But while downvotes seem useful for comments where there's a lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not sure what the additional value would be for posts -- they're either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are actively harmful.

And then this:

> Is it realistic for users to expect to post in an environment where there are no penalties at all, no way for their peers to express disapproval or disagreement with their post?

Huh? Peers express disapproval and disagreement by commenting within the post. As I am doing precisely right now. ;)

Jeff Atwood is a super-smart guy who's done amazing things but this particular piece leaves me quite baffled.

I'm also baffled by his position. I often think that downvotes on HN serve to reinforce conformism to an accepted set of values and ideas. Which might be okay if, say, you want to "immunize" a community against racism, sexism or fake information, but isn't great if issues (as in politics or even in tech on a social level) are a lot more nuanced and there might be plenty of room to explore ideas off the beaten path (and no, I don't mean inane stuff like "but masks don't work" or "but it's just like the flu"). It's easy to find yourself on the receiving end of endless downvotes for something that isn't offensive but clashes with the accepted HN narrative.

It makes me wish downvotes weren't a thing. I'm okay with flagging, since I mostly see comments flagged that clearly break HN's simple rules.

I think the problem when it comes down to it is there's generally more than one kind of comment as well as more than one kind of reason someone downvotes.

You've got your objective factual comment

Your subjective factual comment

And your opinion based comment.

I'm probably missing some.

These can all be combined sometimes into one comment.

Then you've got your reasons for downvoting.

Disagreeing

Factually incorrect

Wrong opinion

Again, probably missing some...

When you start combining all these comment types, with downvote reasons under one generic down arrow, there's going to be some ambiguity, some good comments that get down voted, some bad comments that get upvoted and everything in between.

And...furthermore, it's impossible for other users to determine why a comment was downvoted. Maybe, they were all disagreement downvotes even if it was a factually correct statement. Maybe they were factually incorrect downvotes for a correct opinion post.

There's no real way of knowing, so in the end, better just not to worry about it either way and unless you're clearly posting something against the rules, just try again next time and write something that hopefully doesn't get downvoted.

But that would still happen in an upvote-only system. The 'good' comments would float to the top and the 'bad' ones would stay low in the threads and sub-threads.

To be honest, I feel the most damaging in the HN voting system is the greying out of comments. It often leads to bandwagoning where if a comment even goed to 0, some people just blindly ram the downvote button because someone already (visually) decided for them that that particular comment is 'bad'. No consideration required!

I haven't used it for a while, but imgur's old voting system was quite nice, I think. There was no downvote on the post itself, but instead you could upvote any number of tags on the post. So, for example, if I felt your post was factually incorrectly, I could add a "factually incorrect" tag (or add my +1 if the tag already existed). This was only for posts though, not comments.

Most of the time I see downvotes with no replies it means the person generally disagrees. I upvoted you by the way :)

I agree with you 100%, I love HN and have been here for years but the downvoting feature disgusts me. Either allow a post or don’t, but this weird “fading” of someone’s post just because some people don’t agree with what someone has to say strikes me as petty and cheap. HN should be bigger than that.

It gets faded to signal to other people "this has been downvoted" because you can't see the karma score next to the comment anymore like you could in the early days. One of the things this signal does is it provides the opportunity for corrective upvotes by people who feel "That didn't deserve to be downvoted" which is one of the cultural traditions here.

I think the downvote system here works remarkably well. It's a very big problem to never allow any kind of signal of disagreement or whatever and the system here is intended to keep singal-to-noise ratio high.

It's a big forum and anyone can join. There is no fee to join. You don't need an invitation to join.

You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here." to try to keep Eternal September down to a dull roar so HN can do what HN does better than any other forum I have ever seen, which is why I hang here so much even though it's never been an easy thing for me to be here.

I see what you mean, but I think the “fading” is meant to systematically steer downvotes away from meaning plain disagreement. Whether it succeeds is another issue.

The fading indicates that what an HN downvote means is “I think people shouldn’t see this/this shouldn’t be part of the thread”. Whether it’s bc the post is off topic, flame bait, trolling, just plain boneheaded, etc., is kind of beside the point, although ideally it isn’t simply disagreement.

But that means replying to a post you downvote makes no sense. Why further a conversation you’re trying to bury?

Also, if an opinion is so unpopular it gets downvoted into oblivion, maybe a forum based on votes just isn’t the right venue for it. Start a blog.

I have come to see this "fading" as highlighting. Here as well as in the world at large. To be fair, most of the time the downvoted comment here is trash in one way or another, but sometimes it's gold. Often times it's neither and should be left alone.

Couldn’t agree more. I also find it rude for other people to presume I need to be told what to read.

And this regardless of the fact that downvoted comments are often more nuanced and interesting than the content surrounding them

I've long held that you should have to reply to the comment when downvoting. Even if it's just a "no", that's better than the ability to hide a comment you don't agree with

And to prove your point, your comment is faded with no replies, even though you didn't say anything wrong, but only expressed your opinion.

While the downvote feature is there, you don't have to use it. I only upvote, but I wouldn't consider campaining to remove the downvote. Having a rule to require a response in order to downvote is not a good idea - we just don't need more roles. But I think that is is proper and respectful to give a comment explaining why you downvoted. I often see such comments in response to my downvoted comments. But I might make this suggestion. Have upvotes and downvotes public. If HN has this information then so should we.

> endless downvotes for something that isn't offensive

If you habitually find yourself on the receiving end of this it's worth re-examining why you think it's not offensive and if it looks like everyone else actually agrees with you. To a certain extent you are correct: It is to be expected that when you say something that's too "nice" you get a ton of downvotes (and the same goes for something too "rough", probably), that's just how things are. On balance though, you get so many more upvotes for constructive posts on issues that aren't loaded at all (or where your opinion is so centrist you don't post anything controversial) that it ends up not mattering.

I'll allow that none of this applies when you are an extremist, but to my mind being an extremist means that unfortunately a lot of what you say will be offensive. That loops back to the beginning of my post :)

> the accepted HN narrative.

I'd argue HN isn't a cohesive whole, there are factions / demographics what have you, along with timing. I've seen comments get pounded and even flagged to a death only to later see them revived and constructive conversation below.

I agree with you though, down votes are a net-negative.

I had to vouch for an inoffensive vanilla comment the other day. The downvote army frequently crosses the line to shape their ideology.

I always make sure not to voice a position that goes against the HN group think. Often the discussion really needs it but why bother if it vanishes into the void(0)?

As a funny experiment, make 2 accounts - one for your actual opinions and other that posts only things aligned with the hive mind (e.g. praise anything mentioning Rust, hating on US, etc.) Results are .. interesting :)

I agree, I've seen a lot of downvotes simply on things that aren't pro capitalism. I wish comments were used instead.

I'm not so worried about it.

There's certain number of "tar-baby" subjects/opinions that can get someone downvoted on HN really quick... like suggesting Peter Thiel is an asshole, or saying anything negative about crazy libertarians.

But HN is ALL about discussion. It's a relatively safe place to float an idea and hear some provocative opinions. The techno-libertarians don't actually bite.

Stackoverflow, on the other hand, has higher stakes. People are trying to figure something out at work and running into a brick wall. If they make the mistake of posting an earnest question they make themselves vulnerable and have a good chance of being humiliated and made to feel like shit by some smug prick who's having a bad day. You really need to put on some psychological armor before attempting to question or answer on Stackoverflow. It's an intrinsically toxic environment.

In my experience those comments are often paired with tone problems, such as arrogance or aggressiveness. I always try to vouch or upvote any that seem unwarranted to me.

> But while downvotes seem useful for comments where there's a lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not sure what the additional value would be for posts -- they're either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are actively harmful.

I think this ignores the concept of purpose. If you are optimizing for popularity, then this works. But a lot of forums (including Hacker News, theoretically) intend to optimize for relevance, which is contrary to popularity in many cases.

For a really clear-cut example, Kim Kardashian's Instagram posts get far more likes than pretty much any post on Hacker News. Would Hacker News be better if it were replaced with a redirect to Kim Kardashian's Instagram feed? In terms of how popular the content is, this is an unambiguous yes. But that would not be a better Hacker News, it would just be more popular because you've replaced Hacker News with something completely different.

That's an extreme example, but the same applies for content that's more relevant than Kim Kardashian's instagram feed. Popularity measures breadth of appeal more than anything else, so if you're trying to appeal to specific interests or cultivate some kind of niche content, popularity can be a negative. Downvotes can function as a way for a site's userbase to say, "Whoa, this is not what this place is supposed to be about, even if it is broadly appealing."

> Downvotes can function as a way for a site's userbase to say, "Whoa, this is not what this place is supposed to be about, even if it is broadly appealing."

Can be. I'd argue it would appear to me down votes here are overwhelming used for simple disagreement.

It's fun to discuss what a thing could be, spherical cow in a vacuum, it's probably more useful to discuss how that thing actually gets used and how each of us weight the value of those uses.

Atwood is smart, but the social sophistication of StackOverflow mostly came from Spolsky. I don't know if they are still available, but Atwood and Spolsky had a regular phone call that went out as a podcast from the earliest days of the StackOverflow project.

In terms of the social structure of Spolsky thought "How do I move the Turtle in LOGO" [1] was a good question for the site (he wrote it).

Atwood thought it was a bad question. Judging people's character by the questions they ask became standard. And people have an excuse to be rude and abusive on the site.

Which is unfortunate.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

Amusingly Discourse doesn't have downvotes. It's a great piece of software, but the way in which the meta site is run is a little strange.

I think it's worth wondering whether or not he still holds any of the opinions expressed in the article. It looks like it was written over a decade ago.

The content of the article still stands if you take it about social voting systems in general. I guess you can apply it to like... Twitter or something.

The content will soon apply to YouTube too as they are removing the dislike counts. Though YouTube is much different from HN.

> Peers express disapproval and disagreement by commenting within the post. As I am doing precisely right now. ;)

Exactly. And this is actually something that I like about Twitter, and hate about Reddit. Don't like what I post? Reply and say it.

A lot of HN doesn't do that, they just downvote.

I think it would make a lot of sense to require a response before you can downvote.

I fear required responses would be similar to checked exceptions. They're great in theory, but in practice, without a lot of discipline and actively maintained culture of quality, they both tend to devolve into low-quality boilerplate.

Upvoted :)

Dang. I've been on here years looking for a downvote capability. Apparently you need ~500 karma and I have 200.

Any upvotes would be greatly appreciated.

You seem to have missed the point of the up vote requirement for downvotes though. It exists to restrict downvotes to those who are more active, and thus more "invested?". I believe that this was a very deliberately chosen barrier to entry here.

I definitely did not miss that point. I understand the idea behind a barrier to entry. However I am pretty active. I read HN every day, and I've even written a few submissions, one of which made the front page. So wouldn't you say I'm invested? I just don't comment very often.

I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse. This makes the best people leave in short order.

In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this. Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is unpleasant with or without downvoting. Forums that are highly specific to a small audience can last a long time. Popularity is the death-knell.

This matches my experience as well.

HN having a reasonably high karma threshold for downvoting was a great decision that guards against a lot of common problems. I think that feature, along with the community as a whole being very mindful about protecting the forum quality, plus Dang being an excellent moderator, have greatly contributed to keeping it strong for many years.

In fact it seems like a no brainer decision. Why should a day 1 account be able to downvote content?

There's a lot more. You shouldn't be able to downvote replies to your post. Rate limits. Metamoderation. Hell/shadowbanning. Most good forums rely on an active superadmin moderation a lot - when that goes away or is unreliable the site dies.

Why should a day 1 account be able to upvote content? They both ultimately have the same impact.

I can't agree on the moderation.

The bias in favor of Apple is extreme. I genuinely don't know if the mods are actively paid off, if Apple astroturfs, or whatever. But it seems those threads are disingenuous. It's impossible to form evidence because good criticism of Apple is often deleted.

Meanwhile other threads are dumpster fires.

People with the opposite view see the opposite "extreme" bias. It's basically entirely in the eye of the beholder.

What's odd is how common it is, and how absolutely people are convinced that their particular strain of these contradictory generalizations is the accurate one.

There was an article about bad service at apple stores. I commented that I had mostly positive experiences. Was downvoted.

I think slashdot’s voting system was well equipped to avoid that problem, but they faded anyway. Maybe it was the redesign? I think many of their innovations in 1999 would go a long way to resolve political downvoting today—-new accounts were unable to vote on comments, you were unable to vote and comment in the same posts, metamoderation to ensure fairness, and up or downvotes having to fit categories like ‘insightful’ or ‘offtopic’.

Frankly, I couldn't agree with this more.

I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will become another reddit.

Agreed, though personally I think that the complement is also true, and maybe more insidious: A lot of comments get upvoted because they state an uncontroversial, obvious position that everybody agrees with already.

This is insidious because it encourages people to be the first to say the least interesting thing in order to get rewarded with comment karma. Those comments bubble up to the top of the thread, where they're held aloft by more and more people who see their existing opinions restated.

Ultimately the reward structure encourages discussions where people are indulged, in the same way the punishment structure discourages people being challenged.

I'd say this effect is more pronounced on Reddit than HN, but you can see it here too.

I'm not looking for "edgy" comments, I'm just saying that it's more useful in the long run to upvote comments that provide new information or perspectives, or at least state a common sense position in a different, compelling way.

I've noticed that when I comment against the status quo, my comments quickly dip to -2 or lower from rapid fire downvotes, then slowly tick upward into positive territory over time as the more patient readers come through.

It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal. Maybe give less weight to someone who rapid-fire downvotes comments faster than they could possibly read them?

> I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo

The best thing to do here is for the community to step in and actively up-vote unfairly downvoted comments.

I suspect that events outside of HN would have more of a chilling effect than the environment of HN itself. I know there are times when I felt like presenting a contrary view on a story but did not. I suspect that a fair number of HN members may even accept those points of view. Yet I have also seen enough of those "conversations" to know that they rapidly go downhill.

> down voted simply because they went against the status-quo.

Every tool will be abused sometimes.

I think the voting system mostly works extremely well - the system needs to be viewed as a whole with all the compromises that includes, rather than drill down on one particular failure.

Sometimes people use voting for bad reasons — I know I have (though I am quite conscientious to try and learn to vote more carefully).

Agree. And yes, privilege just uncontroversial standpoints or promote indirect pressure over the members will result in community fragmentation. Therefore HN could turn into "one of many" monotone sites to just pass around.

> I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo.

It is not possible to download posts on HackerNews, no matter how many karma you have. Did you mean comments? Because I think that actually one of the strongests points of HN that all posts will get equal footing. (they can be flagged though)

I dunno about everybody else, but there were about 15 years where every single story had several trolls commenting purely for the purpose of dropping a racial slur. Meta-moderate for long enough, and you could occasionally earn 5 karma, which could easily get blown on downvoting stupid shit from a single story. It was a cesspool, and I think a lot of people left because of that.

They started a really good thing with the user moderation, I think meta-moderation and the vote-category dropdown are very smart, but they locked it down too hard and moderation was largely ineffective.

I think that stuff was not a reflection on forums or moderation in general but specific to the time that Slashdot was born in.

Rob Malda had a very strong pro free-speech stance and so the site developed this odd sub-culture early on that was very self-referential and filled with Slashdot specific memes. In fact Slashdot had memes before memes even became a widely used word. Natalie Portman+hot grits etc.

I think it attracted people who enjoyed the thrill of being able to "publish" anything at all. I am very skeptical those people actually said those sorts of things or even believed them in real life, because most of the racial troll posts were almost entirely template and extremely repetitive in meme-like ways, most of them were barely coherent: they weren't people genuinely trying to convince anyone of anything.

There was a second factor that I suspect was also 'encouraging' trolls at this time: Slashdot's combination of "We never delete a post for any reason", allowing anonymous comments and a very sophisticated moderation system turned it into a game for some people. There were people who just enjoyed trying to break the site by doing things that you don't see on any other forum. For instance there was a period where people kept coming up with creative abuses of Unicode to construct page widening posts, stuff like that. You had a lot of creative programmer types faced with something that was an utterly pure system, designed to stop abuse with no human-level decisions to beat, and no legal penalties for trying. So it turned into a form of lightweight hacking practice, both machine and social, without any actual legal risk.

These days people who enjoy finding exploits in computer systems for the sheer thrill of it have plenty of more profitable outlets, like the zero day hunt programs run by big companies. If someone were to try creating a new Slashdot and recapturing the glory days I think they'd be faced with a totally different set of problems.

I’m not a fan of meta moderation. It lacks context. I upvoted or downvoted for reasons and without knowing that reason how can someone determine whether that was appropriate? When I metamoderated I was extremely forgiving for the same reason. Unless it was clear abuse I “okayed” it.

Incidentally at some point I stopped getting moderation points even though I was a frequent meta moderator. Whether that was due to meta moderation of my mods, I don’t know.

There were rumors of a blacklist and there was a thread which was closed down critical of either an admin or the site. I participated in the thread rather moderately IIRC, but that was around the time I never saw another mod point.

At least on HN, dang will tell you what he didn’t like about your behavior. dang is also outwardly cool with disagreeing with him, which isn’t true with everyone.

A lot of people were pretty upset about the redesign. They also sold to Conde Nast and started adopting a different (more intrusive) model of advertising. I can't remember details but the site started feeling more.... slimey over time.

Slashdot's commenting/moderation system was exceptional.

Grateful to HN for the excellence of theirs.

Slashdot got popular and the insightful comments got drowned out by Funny+5 because it's low effort karma building that feels like being popular.

I learned my lesson and try to only inject humor into otherwise useful comments on HN.

This is one of those things that I did not realize kills discourse until I experienced a community that mainly posts serious content and discussion. Reddit now is particularly bad as each thread is sea of quips, one-liners, and trashtalk which pretty much floods out the pond of interesting discussion. "Funny" can be a great thing, but if that's all anyone ever tries to offer, it becomes very tiresome.

My memory is fuzzy on my slashdot days, but wasn’t there a way to filter the funny suff?

to my recollection you didn't gain karma on funny mods. So a completely boneheaded comment may net -8 karma, but still show up as +5 Funny which would be the "ironic" Funny comment.

Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin mining in 2011 or so and then I woke up and a) started applying the time value of money to a lot of things and b) stopped having intellectual discussions on the open internet.

That is very real truth that according to the current narrative taking place in the comments here, many of you will downvote what I am saying because you don’t like... whatever it is you don’t like.

I have had children and paid off two mortgages since then. Explaining my point of view to the mob no longer has value to me.

For what it's worth, I would normally downvote this post because it essentially opens with "I'm absolutely right", goes straight into "I will be downvoted" and closes with "I don't need attention". What is the point of that? All that you've come here to say is apparently that you don't need to be read and you're successful regardless of what anyone thinks. Great, I'm happy for you. What value have you added to this conversation? You're not helping on an emotional level and intellectually I'm really struggling to see the insight I'm supposed to be deriving from this as well.

Personally, I left slashdot when I felt the community changed. It started to feel less like excitement, and more like cranky libertarians complaining. I remember CmdrTaco leaving the helm, so maybe it was his steering that kept it good to me? No idea.

When I gave up on slashdot I put a call out to my social circle for a replacement, and that's how I learned about HN! That was nearly a decade ago, and I'm still grateful!

>The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse.

You've quite well described my latest experienced with StackExchange sites that are very popular (like Stack Overflow). The downvotes rain for any question without feedback. A comment provides an answer, but not an "Answer" that can be pinned. Vague "Opinion based" flags are sometimes levied, but similar questions for different regimes are upvoted and given quality answers.

I've had similar experiences on ServerFault part of StachExchange. If I simply answer a question with the correct technical answer, my answer is basically ignored. If I take that exact same answer and add a bold title, some cute paragraph formatting, some no-format text boxes, add some flowery wording like I am giving a Ted Talk, then people love my answers. So that is what I do and why I rarely answer questions any more. They also try to encourage me to edit other peoples posts, but I already have a day job.

I feel like a lot more people qualify to do metamoderation in the SO network than ever do it. This is essentially sabotage in the form of benign neglect.

The broken concept is downvoting for others. Instead, it should be downvoting for yourself. If somebody downvotes of flags something, I don't want that something to be hidden from my view, unless I've upvoted the downvoter in past. The "global downvoting" model feeds the wannabe censors who feel entitled to impose their opinion on others.

Ironically reddit has solved this by having terrible search facilities. Subs can stay small and hidden.

I don't see how absence of downvote button helps. Popular topics without moderation get flooded with garbage sooner or later.

> people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse

Hello Reddit. Unfortunately now I basically just use Reddit to browse and don't comment much, because of that behaviour

Would actually like to see a list of largest karma-wise HN members who left.

By leaving I would say over 180 days inactive. Dang can you post the result please:

SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100

Be the change that you want to see in the universe. HN has a super easy to use API and I have downloaded the entire history of the site before for a past project. If you don't want to do the leg work yourself I am positive that the data set is out there for download somewhere if you google around.

Data analysis note: the public datasets only have submissions and comments, and just because a HN user has stopped submitting/commenting doesn't mean they quit HN. Lurking is fun.

That would give no information about the reason someone left: there are a lot of reasons to stop interacting with hn that have nothing to do with the “best people leave in short order” theory.

I know some people just switched to a different account and you would think they left.

>SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100

Ah, Hacker News is too cool to use something as pedestrian as a database ;)

But there is a Google BigQuery dataset[0,1]. I don't know how up to date it is.

[0]https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-...

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502

I used to be incredibly active on here, and then I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons. I have all but stopped commenting compared to my previous activity. It just stopped being fun. Even posts I make that have nothing to do with politics, that only point out provable, factual information, get downvoted. I have over 13K karma, even after losing a few thousand points over the last 18 months or so. So the things that I have to say weren't always unpopular. I didn't change - the community did. It became a hostile, vindictive place.

I still visit daily because HN does a good job of surfacing interesting articles, but I used to find the comments more interesting than the stories themselves. That has changed in the last few years, as identity politics have taken hold. I can now accurately predict the content of many of the comments on a given story by simply reading its title. It's sad to see.

Browsing your recent comments, have you considered ... not commenting about downvotes?

I see a lot of "Why am I getting downvoted for this?", "Group think, downvotes, blah blah blah.", "I'm going to get downvoted for this but...", all of which are just magnets for more downvotes.

I think if you just stopped commenting on the downvoting, well, you'd still get the odd comment downvoted from time to time, because hey, you say things people don't like, you're going to get the downvotes, and yeah, people don't always explain why, which I know is annoying ... but you'd at least no longer be compounding it with the three or four follow-on comments that also all get downvoted, and your net karma would probably be fine.

Down voted you because of your about me.

What are some of your views that you think have become unpopular over time?

Have you considered changing your account from 'downandout' to 'downvoteme'? It probably would do the trick.

> I started getting downvoted on virtually every comment, likely for political reasons.

That could well be because a lot of the downvotes I saw in your recent comment history were on outright political topics (Parler/Trump‘s ban from Twitter/…) It might help if you just stayed away from those if you otherwise enjoyed being active here?

I agree it's a good place to find interesting articles.

I also think reading the comments is rarely a good use of time. Just feels like the median discussion site in that regard.

It's hilarious how your comment got immediately downvoted for sharing a personal anecdote about the very same thing. Must really be rubbing the people who downvote for political difference reasons the wrong way.

Getting it wrong for 12 years now:

The Value of Downvoting, Or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633668 - Jan 2021 (1 comment)

10 Years In, Was He Right? “Value of Downvoting; How HN Gets It Wrong” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409231 - June 2020 (1 comment)

The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325726 - Jan 2017 (12 comments)

The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875619 - Jan 2016 (36 comments)

Reddit's Discussion about HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508801 - March 2009 (24 comments)

The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948 - March 2009 (114 comments)

The value of downvoting, or how Stackexchange gets it wrong about HN's voting system.

It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding.

If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but conversation keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon. Flagging is for problematic stories.

What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the people playing that game.

12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation game and the quality of the site suffers for it.

It's gross how in the Reddit redesign comment threads longer than a couple levels deep are actually hidden, even if there's only a single thread on the post. Apparently deep discussion is something they now want to discourage.

> Apparently deep discussion is something they now want to discourage.

That might be true, but a more benign explanation is incompetence.

> Flagging is for problematic stories.

If you follow at all which stories are rejected flagging is used as downvoting on a daily basis unless your definition of 'problematic' is extremely broad.

I have come across flagged stories that looked like they would form the basis of an interesting conversation, noticed a string of problematic comments on the story, and agreed with the story being flagged.

Sometimes the problem isn't with the story or disagreeable opinions. Rather, it is with the tone of responses.

The notion that HN is well-moderated is bizarre. HN is exceptionally hostile to those who hold beliefs contrary to HN-acceptable norms.

If you want to get banned quickly, criticize pg portfolio companies (even politely, with valid criticism), point out that white supremacist and other hate speech is welcomed so long as it is polite; point out that responses to hate speech are _not_ tolerated.....

The community here used to be absolutely amazing. 10-15 years ago the discussions here were actionable, and I was able to make valuable professional connections in the the comments.

These days, that doesn’t happen. The discussions are lower value, less open minded, and more strident. It’s a pile of shit.

And candidly, that’s why I’m logged into a banned account to post this. Uncomfortable truths can’t be posted from IPs/cookies/users that you want to preserve. Daniel Gackle will ban your ass if you point out, for example, that he tolerates and even welcomes extremely bigoted shit.

As far as reputation goes, I see little difference between HN and Reddit. Why do you think HN does it right and Reddit wrong?

SE prominently displays reputation points, which is different.

Reddit shows up/down totals on users, comments, and stories. It's really in your face. HN has a subtle little arrow or two, and you only see the sum of up/down on your own comments. We know when things have been downvoted, but it's much harder to tell if something has been upvoted. And when things do get downvoted, they're grayed out -- it takes more effort to read downvoted comments (click the date), so if you're skimming you'll just skip unpopular comments until it gets relevant again. So display-wise, I like the cleaner HN over the noisier and visibly gamified Reddit.

Also, not insignificantly, HN is a side project, not a startup. It can succeed at its goals and stay small, not worrying about "capturing the market" or whatever. Staying small means dang can generally be expected to read most of the comments on the site.

And by "small", I mean that there's rarely much action on the page-3 stories. Threads that get paginated are rarely worth wading into. If a million people started using HN, then it would quickly become so unusable that they'd all quit within a week. Reddit "solves" this "problem" by making subreddits, and now it's a poison-breathing hydra.

Not sure about reddit but here the reputation doesn't really mean anything, please downvote this comment as you please and I will prove my point :-)

In reddit, karma is much more prominent than upvotes on hackernews. At least as far as I am aware.

Though I doubt redditors reddit just for the karma.

> the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest

Correct, -4 is the lowest a comment can go: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

Do title submissions also start at -4? I noticed that there is often almost a hard line where article submission gets much more visibility if it goes over 4 points.

I always assumed SE got voting right because why else are they the top dog? I never felt any need for them to exist because programming forums (or usenet groups earlier) exised since forever and once Google give us usable search(sorry, Altavista) I could find an answer for basically any question.

I think SE has terrible voting. Voting fundamentally doesn't work for what they're trying to do, because if you want wiki-style best-of answers to specific questions you cannot use a simple counting algorithm.

For one, answers change over time. The best answer five years ago will have accumulated the most votes. The most current and correct answer will never be able to catch up with that.

Two, there's a lot of nitpicking and irrelevant point scoring. Making answers a competition instead of a collaboration brings out the worst in some people.

Three, there's an assumption that voters know what the best answer is. Because they often don't - which is why they're looking for answers - the answers with the most upvotes are the ones that look plausible. They're not necessarily definitive, or ideal.

Four - for code - the code sometimes has obvious bugs or typos. Upvotes are supposed to fix this, but clearly they don't.

Five - the mod problem, where valid questions are closed and duplicates aren't really duplicates.

I think SE would work better as a collaborative semi-wiki, or something else in that ballpark. I don't think the karma scoring does a good job - except in the very basic sense that you get some relevant answers in one place, and it's still up to you to decide which one (if any) solves the problem.

> why else are they the top dog?

They've got really good SEO game, and answers to most of my newbie questions when I'm learning a new language. But I tried contributing to the site for a little while... nope, it's wickedly political for all the wrong reasons and I quit before long.

It's worth noting that 2009 was a eon ago in internet time. Almost nothing from that era is applicable to social media behavior in 2021. Especially Hacker News, which IMO was much more elitist/hostile at that time and fortunately has improved in that aspect over the years.

Seemed friendly enough in 2010. There was a lot less news cycle discussion and more tech (but less product) discussion, so that might have been alienating. Also a lot more YC specific stuff, so maybe that felt elitist.

HN definitely moves in the proper direction on this one. The ONLY purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation. If, contrarily, a user wished to provide a form of disagreement they would do so with a reply. Why? Because votes are a means of action to express an appeal to agreement/disagreement.

I remember pointing this out once on Reddit, before I deleted my account there, and it temporarily changed peoples' behavior resulting in more replies to disagreeable comments in either r/javascript or r/programming (I don't remember which). Most of the justifications that arose from down voting without a reply, supposedly a silent and anonymous form of disagreement, all summarized down to excuses about how writing anything takes too much time or a user's an inability to write an original comment. But then, in those users defense, Reddit feels like such an echo chamber.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...

> The ONLY purpose of down votes is to suppress conversation.

This assumes all conversation is equal quality. That particular point has never been true in social media, and has actually become worse post-2016, with increased partisanship and bad faith arguing.

It's impossible to run a high-quality discussion forum without some sort of check on bad behavior. That said, it's up for debate whether downvotes are the best answer to this problem.

First, your point implies down votes are a check on bad behavior as opposed to a form of disagreement. I suspect many users use social media voting for a variety of different reasons.

Secondly, there are two solutions to that problem:

1. If you believe the environment, group, or social body of a particular conversing venue is heavily biased, whether deliberate or not, you don't have to participate there. Simply leave.

2. If you believe a particular user is deliberately exercising some form of bad behavior or displays an inability to follow the conversation you don't have to reply to them. Simply let it die.

For example: whether or not I ever liked or voted for President Trump I would never spend time on Reddit at r/theDonald because I know conversation there is biased like a form of cult worship. Why bother conversing where you are not allowed to disagree on any matter?

It is still wrong. But even brilliant people/groups/institutions can get it stubbornly wrong. Let us say that HN thrives despite the disutility of the downvoting regime.

Those are mostly out of date. Maybe stop self-celebrating past victories, it's not very becoming. ;)

Flagging is where HN gets it wrong, IMO. So many slightly controversial and important topics are being removed with this mechanism. We're left with all the vanilla stuff.

Flagging is necessary to keep the site on-topic in my opinion. People will happily upvote controversy that has little value or importance to this site.

I agree that flagging has value, but it is grossly misused to suppress discussions that are on topic but are outside of the overton window.

Generally speaking I think HN is wonderful, and if staying wonderful means we have to tolerate censorship, I'll gladly make that trade, but I do wish people had thicker skin (that's a problem on all sides by the way).

> controversy that has little value or importance to this site

What do you mean by "this site"? The participants in this forum are the site. I've had discussions flagged that I thought to be valuable. Why would you want to get rid of controversy anyway? Do you want to discuss only popular old hat things? Stability under diversity is a sign of health in an ecosystem.

It makes for a nice beige set of topics for sure.

> Flagging

Flagging is a problem sometimes. I feel like it's common for a comment to get flagged when someone strongly opposes it. It's really upsetting to see that. Especially since it feels like the flaggers are a small minority, but they're shutting down discussions for everyone.

>Getting it wrong for 12 years now

What do you think HN does get wrong?

Phrasing it in a more positive way, what could you do to raise the quality of conversation on HN even higher?

I think dang was being facetious here when he said "getting it wrong." He knows damn well that downvoting does no good for a platform since it is so easily abused to suppress ideas.

Yes, facetious and a little smug—but the rest of your comment is wildly off base from my perspective. Saying that downvoting does no good for HN is like saying white blood cells do no good for an organism. It's critical to the immune system. Yes, downvotes can do harm, just like white blood cells can. But try living without them.

I don't know if you meant to make this funny, but I laughed really hard.

I'm a huge fan of no downvote button, so much so in fact that I don't think users of any karma level should be able to do it.

Why concentrate this power into the hands of a privileged few? It's a representative system where we vote certain users into high karma, but they needn't return any favors and can subsequently downvote things that are otherwise suitable for the platform. Privilege can, and will, be abused in full.

I feel like downvoting on HN is a way of saying “No. We don’t behave like that here”. It’s one of our community’s tools for preserving, teaching and enforcing our values with newcomers. Yes, it’s open to abuse. But it fills an important social function. And from that perspective, of course it’s limited to people who’ve been involved in the community awhile.

Personally I also use it for comments that are so absurd that they don't warrant a comment.

Isn’t that what flagging is for?

Most people just use it to signal disagreement. I just did so now.

Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system. Though downvotes seem to work pretty well as-is for HN, I rarely see dead comments that were killed by downvotes rather than anti-spam features.

If we take HN as reddit 2.0, what would be HN 2.0 I wonder? If I were the one to make it I'd create a system to promote the comments of people with professional expertise on the subject being discussed. HN has mostly solved the politeness and flamewar issues but IMO one its major flaws is that people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about.

It's easier to write a bad comment than a good one, so I don't think that downvoting bad comments should be more difficult than it is now. HN software already has little nudges that make it easier to gain karma than to lose it:

- You can earn points but never lose them by submitting URLs for discussion.

- You can't lose more than 4 points per post, no matter how many times it is downvoted. There is no upper limit to points gained from a single upvoted comment.

- There is only a 24 hour time window in which comments can be downvoted, but they can still be upvoted even months later.

The expertise problem is harder. Sometimes I see a post that has more misconceptions than sentences, but is grammatically correct and written in a confident tone. Only people who actually understand the subject matter will spot the problems quickly. It's tedious to write introductory level corrections for commonly repeated mistakes. For some of them I have considered keeping a mini-FAQ locally and pasting standard responses to standard misconceptions, but HN also discourages repeating identical posts.

If I downvote a misinformed post the original poster won't know where they went wrong, and people who see a grayed post won't necessarily understand what's wrong with it either. The saving grace of the downvote is that it affects comment sorting order, so at least misconception-heavy posts that are downvoted won't dominate the upper reaches of the discussion page.

What’s the criteria for a “bad comment”? And how do you objectively evaluate it?

I lurk and post once in a while. What I’ve noticed is that rarely is something downvoted for being factually incorrect (relatively speaking). You just have to offer a perspective that doesn’t conform with the hive mind and the downvoting essentially amounts to censorship of opinions.

Most of the comments I downvote the official comment guidelines in the section "In Comments" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When I see heated back-and-forth discussion chains I'll often find myself downvoting several comments and upvoting none of them, because sarcastic quippy retorts to bad comments are also bad comments.

I'll also downvote comments for factual inaccuracy, particularly if I don't have the time to patiently correct them. This only partially mitigates the damage and doesn't really help the original author to learn. When someone writes a comment with just a single big mistake, and they don't seem to have a history of willfully repeating it, that's when I am most likely to write a lengthy reply with explanation and citations.

Anything which is Reddit level of quality in terms of contributing value. For example, low hanging puns that add no actual substantial information.

I'd appreciate some examples. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but in my experience downvoted comments tend to have something beyond a counterpoint or difference of opinion; their content is usually irrelevant or unnecessarily snarky or somehow hostile.

It also depends on time hours.

I once made a post that criticized the Anglocentric perspective of an article. — it was initially upvoted, but then became downvoted when UTC+2 went to sleep, and then upvoted again when UTC+2 woke up. — one can take a particular guess as to why.

For me the fuzzy litmus is whether it "promotes knowledge or aids the discussion".

Despite whether I agree with it, I upvote anything that I learn something new from.

Factual incorrectness is often downvoted, but usually only if there is a reply that points it out.

I think downvoting is an anti-pattern because it's a negative interaction, and I think negative interactions shouldn't be encouraged if we value high quality discourse.

If downvoting bad comments (for any definition of bad) was harder or even outright impossible you'd still have an alternative: upvote an other, better comment to have it shadow what you consider a less valuable contribution. And that's a positive interaction.

Whenever I find a comment that I think is on-topic and somewhat constructive, but I still fundamentally disagree with the take, I generally go hunting for a comment that embraces my point of view (or write one myself) and upvote that.

I very rarely downvote comments on this site, and generally only do it for comments that I consider to be completely off topic, flamebait or stupid "meme" references. That being said I do comment quite a bit and I admit that I'm always a bit frustrated when I take the time to write what I consider to be a constructive (if sometimes controversial) comment and I get downvoted reddit-style. It feels disrespectful, almost. I probably care too much about that stuff, I acknowledge that.

How do you promote signal over noise without being able to attenuate (downvote) the noise? Trying to outshout the noise results in FB style cacophony.

> "If I downvote a misinformed post the original poster won't know where they went wrong, and people who see a grayed post won't necessarily understand what's wrong with it either."

that's ok, the onus is on the downvoted poster to figure it out for themselves. usually that requires seeing a pattern over the course of a few downvoted posts rather than pinpointing it exactly from a given post.

most downvoted posts break one or more hn rules, but a few are downvoted ideologically, so a little resilience is required. strictly unpopular opinions can often be more tactfully rephrased and at least be accepted for discussion, if not agreement. this is a pretty good life skill to develop generally anyways.

I find it sort-of ironic that at the time I am writing this reply, _your_ comment has been downvoted and I'm not sure why.

Presumably the onus is on you to figure that out, but good luck, since I'm not sure either and usually I can tell.

Not everything on HN is user-facing. For example, one comment can only sink to -4 points, but further downvotes on that comment still contribute to the user being muted. I've experienced that myself.

SO and HN are a bit different though. When you go to SO, you want to know what is right. For HN, you want to read something interesting.

“one its major flaws is that people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about”

See: any thread about aeronautics, education, or (historical) warfare.

... and machine learning and medical research and ...

I personally notice this most frequently on the topic of human nutrition. Most days I don't bother to read the comments on ANY nutrition article because they're too depressingly wrong.

... and ... and ... and ...

"Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system."

Say, I like the idea. No doubt people have discussed this to death elsewhere. You can definitely see downvotes used as simple disagreement or for punishing unpopular speech (rather than being wrong, let's say). That's a bummer but is a side effect of modern times.

Let's say that a issuing a downvote resulted in a 15 minute break from posting or voting. You gotta want to do it.

" people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about."

I'm afraid that's baked deeply into the DNA of computer programmers.

While not a perfect solution, perhaps you could tag various conversations by subject and keeping track of which topics a user tends to discuss. If a user mostly talks about a few subjects, have their comments in conversations with those tags be prioritized by the ranking algorithm and deprioritized outside of it. Obviously just because you spend a lot of time talking about something doesn't mean you actually know much about it, but it's a start. Perhaps you could improve further by keeping track of users' karma within a topic (presumably those speaking from ignorance will be less upvoted), but this runs the risk of promoting views that are popular instead of informed.

I think if people want the next level of quality on technical discussion, there needs to be a gatekeeping mechanism which is concerned with technical competency.

I would also expect such a place to have a magnitude or two fewer people.

I've tried that in my own community but it's a real struggle because in my experience newbies drive the conversation much more than pros so in my case gatekeeping was creating a silent community of highly skilled lurkers.

With no gatekeeping, there's lots of activity and pros feel like participating once in a while with deep discussions sparked from seemingly simple questions, but on the other hand a lot of pros feel alienated and leave if the average level of competency is too low.

I've been toying with the idea of pro:newbie ratios but haven't implemented anything yet.

An approach I think is good is for pros to help visitors solve problems, using messages of interest to other pros who can also participate and it can really brainstorm in unforseen ways.

Pros learn by watching other people's problems get addressed, and contribute when it falls under their domain expertise. They interact in a positive way to form the personality of the messageboard. Which should be a reference point for an actual newbie who wants to participate long-term, but it should be expected that most visitors will not return after their problem is solved. The message board becomes a curated/community archive for solutions.

Where the subject matter and the discussion are contained within the board.

That's for a problem-solving message board.

Now HN is a tech news aggregator with comments which make it a board of a different kind, with way more diverse comments to deal with than any one news site.

And very many news sites individually are challenged to adjust to the recognized lower quality of comments the last few years by trying experimental approaches or no longer accepting comments at all.

The news is always elsewhere, only the comments are here and that makes it debatable.

Maybe there's such a thing as a problem-creating message board?

You would need to provide professional indemnity insurance cover. Most policies likely don’t cover advising the whole internet.

HN comments can't be killed by downvotes and the karma loss on the commenter is capped at -4. As forums-with-downvoting go, HN's version is fairly benign.

I think downvoting should cost something. Maybe not a whole point, but something.

If shutting someone else up (and let's not mince words here... that is exactly what you are doing) isn't worth even a token cost to you, maybe you should reconsider whether shutting them up is truly justified in the first place.

They are doing a pretty good keeping the spammers away, considering how easy it is to create a new account.

>making downvotes costly seems like a good system

Habr.com makes both up and downvotes costly, and they have an evolved system checks and balances. The best I´ve seen. They can even fight off Kremlin bots successfully, this is major feat in their region/language of choice.

Maybe downvotes should cost some karma? might be a trigger to think before downvoting

I think a critical missing context of reposting an old 2009 article is that a newer post in 2011 makes downvotes free instead of costing reputation:

>Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...

Why? He saw that users were too hesitant in downvoting which allowed bad content to grow and further degraded the site. Changing the downvoting mechanics fixed that.

(I don't know if there's been an update since 2011 to the downvoting system and incentives.)

Downvotes on questions are free, downvotes on answers cost 1 reputation (see https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reput...).

Ah, this explains why it gets more and more outdated.

The glaring issue in this article (which I couldn't bring myself to finish) is that he equates downvoting to "evil or incorrect post(s)". Which would be true in an ideal world, but the reality becomes downvotes are equivalent to "I disagree with you".

If plentiful downvoting is allowed, discourse becomes a popularity contest. Fortunately most of the experienced users here seem to understand this and reserve their downvotes for appropriate situations.

I moderate a reddit community with ~200k subscribers, and I really wish I could disable downvoting. Automod takes care of most posts that violate our community rules, and I usually catch the ones that slip past within an hour or so.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, quality posts are almost always downvoted immediately. (I assume it's by self-promoters hoping that it will cause their content to rise in the rankings.)

Hiding posts scores has helped with bandwagoning, but I wish the two options were "upvote" and "report to mods."

Further:

A) It would be nice if the mods had a way to flag the post to make it require additional work to see on most / default clients.

B) If multiple mods sign off on a given post being a poor match for constructive discourse that is when most clients wouldn't even display the existence without a special viewing mode or preference. (This assumes an append / write-only forum.)

C) For all USERS, it would be nice if a special type of reply allowed for a post to be a "contrasting viewpoint", which might get displayed at the same node-level as the post being replied to, as part of a package of tightly related views on a topic.

>"...upvote and report to mods."

This to me seems like the best approach.

Downvoting can also have a snowball effect. If someone disagrees with you, especially in a contested topic where it's opinion or unclear who is correct, downvotes signal other people to also downvote. You can see the effect on Reddit.

Comments that hit -1 can still recover. Comments rarely recover after -3 or so. The only counter is for the commenter to edit and call out readers for frivolous downvoting.

I have a comment on reddit that was both downvoted to nearly -100 and was given gold. I was given the award because the actual information I gave was correct. Which someone mentioned in a reply. It was downvoted because no one liked the answer.

There is definitely a phenomenon where truthful/factual but "inconvenient" comments are much more vigorously downvoted than false, inaccurate or incorrect ones.

Well, you have my respect. Standing on a thing you know to be correct that gets that much open dislike is not an easy thing to do. Most people likely would have deleted the correct but hated answer long before it accumulated that many downvotes.

> The only counter is for the commenter to edit and call out readers for frivolous downvoting.

That usually earns a downvote from me. People commenting on downvotes is boring and usually shows a lack of insight, for example obviously making zero effort to understand why their comment is poorly received, or blaming a conspiracy, or blaming groupthink. I have occasionally answered “why the downvotes” questions, but it usually feels like a waste of my time to do so.

I tend to downvote at the nexus of stuff I disagree with + expressed in an unproductive, rude, spammy, abusive, or flip manner. It's certainly true that when a flippant post is something I agree with I'm more likely to elide on by it. I assume most people do the same thing.

pg once said that since upvotes are used to agree, using downvotes to disagree isn't bad. I am often downvoted even when making civil comments that people disagree with and I'm fine with it. That's how this forum operates. So be it.

I'd love to create a new voting system that looks like an orange sliced in half. The top 4 options are positives, the bottom 4 negatives. Everyone gets 2 votes per post. Two of the options are 'I agree' and the other is 'I disagree with this post'

No system will be free of problems or gaming.

But, doesn't hacker news actually have implicit down voting by way of time? HN isn't designed to be a searchable Q&A or forum. It's a "what's a currently popular" site. If something isn't good, it just disappears faster than the opposite.

Have I wished I could down vote things sometimes? Sure. But then I just wait 5 minutes, refresh, and it's gone.

Actually instead of counting down-votes HN software could just count how often a post was up-voted and then that vote regretted (reversed) and adjust the visibility to boost or silence. But that is still susceptible to misuse so there should be a limit on how often that would count.

I really like downvoting where you lose one of your past upvotes in order to downvote. It's a nice little filter that people who care about how many upvotes they have won't use, and puts an end to some amount of frivolous downvoting.

In a meta way, you kind of have to use a little bit of your own point capital to downvote something, so if you're highly upvoted by the community then calling BS on something is easier for you and the risk taking for doing so makes more sense, versus someone who just signed up.

I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?

I am not sure adding a cost to downvotes would promote diversity so much. It is easy to game the system and post popular opinions to farm upvotes. If you do what you say, you give more power to the people already playing the reputation game.

You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner.

My experience is that:

- voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is surfacing the interesting conversations

- dead comments really deserve to die (I can’t remember a counter-example)

- greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic cases are “right but unpopular”, which is not that frequent. And when it happens that’s fine, they are still readable.

> I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?

I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It’s true that popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at the same time I can see how having a number that can go down would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or casual trolling.

I like the idea of only showing the number of up boats and when her user is negative, and possibly taking action at some point.

And avoid users speaking to the audience opposed to directly addressing the parent comment

Hacker news gates some functionality based on accumulated Votes, so maybe once you hit the necessary threshold it is hidden

I don't know if these are popular opinions or not:

1: I really wish I could downvote Hacker News articles.

2: I really wish there was some friction to downvoting. Perhaps something like choosing among: disagree, factually wrong, mean, incoherent

Regarding the downvoting of articles: For awhile I used to see a regular pattern of weird articles on the front page. The discussion would then predictably involve a mod defending the article. IMO, I think downvoting an article would help in this situation.

Reduce the bandwagon effect. People see a slightly gray (0 points) comment and pile up on it without thinking. It affects their view and introduces a subconcious bias.

Just don't grey out comments for 2 hours or so to allow people to vote. It's fine to greyout comments after that.

Didn't slashdot have a feature kind of like this? Reasons why something was upvoted or downvoted alongside their score.

Correct. SoylentNews goes one step further, and adds +0 agree and -0 disagree. I'm not sure if such votes have any real effect.

I love the idea of +0 for Agree and -0 for Disagree. A comment’s score should be about how high quality it is, not how popular it is or how many people agree with it. Keep a separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious. Leave actual negative scores for low quality things like spam, flamebait and harassment.

Yeah, that's the one thing I miss from Slashdot while I'm here.

I think it still has the feature... I just haven't used Slashdot enough over the past few years to moderate.

But, one of the things I like here is that you can vote in the same thread that you're posting in. (IE, I upvoted you because you reminded me where my idea came from.)

I rather really wish there was no way at all to vote on comments. — what purpose does it serve?

I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong nor easily disagreed with, and thus incurring the most upvotes from simply being quick to read.

> I rather really wish there was no way at all to vote on comments. — what purpose does it serve?

It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal vs. noise.

> I very often see the top comment on the page to be a thoughtless one-line that is self-evident, but also not wrong

I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the comment’s position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.

> It serves both to manage the S/N ratio and to provide feedback to commenters on what the community sees as signal vs. noise.

No, it provides feedback as to what the community wishes to see as to better help those who care conform to it.

Absolutely useless, unimaginative comments that contribute nothing and state the obvious are seldom downvoted, so long as they not voice anything that disagrees with the voterbase, and may even be upvoted.

> I don’t see that often on threads with substantial discussion. I suppose if that was a real problem, weighting upvotes by some measure of how relatively unfavorable the comment’s position is at the time upvoted would mitigate it.

I went through your own list of comments and could find some greyed out comments that really had no business being greyed out and downvoted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815734

This is not noise, this is something someone disagreed with, for reasons I don't understand.

I've seen quite a fair bit of greyed out comments on H.N. that were accurate and informative, as the comments that truly do not belong are most likely removed by the moderators to begin with.

I believe that comments are most likely to be upvoted by users when they say something the user already agrees with without thinking, as such something that tells him nothing new. — the end result is that the least informative, most obvious comments tend to be the most upvoted.

That pattern still happens. At least I hope it does; we want HN to have weird articles.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I initially loved the idea of voting posts up and down. Thanks to seeing how it actually works on SO and here, well, I am not much of a fan anymore.

At the very least, if I ever implemented it myself, I'd require that people explain why they are voting up, or voting down, before they could vote. And I'd not limit users from being able to vote until they magically get to the right amount of "karma".

Without requiring an explanation, votes are more akin to boos and cheers than anything useful. Not a very good way to encourage a diverse culture.

Yeah, I really wish that HN required you to comment in order to downvote. Or even just required that a comment had replies before it could be downvoted; I don't care so much that every single person justifies their downvote as that the person getting downvoted gets an explanation.

I think this could backfire. Toxic/trolling comments do not need to be dignified with a response, and requiring one may increase the incentive to write inflammatory posts (assuming that at least some people do this—consciously or not—to instigate reactions).

For well-intentioned posts that are factually incorrect, it seems that there are usually replies that explain the reason for the downvote. When a comment is wrongfully banished to the grey nothingness, oftentimes others step up and defend it. The community immune system functions well as is.

Also, I adore the fade-to-grey side effect of the downvotes. It’s like spritzing a cat with water for scrounging on the counters—an ultimately harmless but super effective reprimand.

Posts like that should be flagged for moderation, not voted on. A community site should have guidelines that everyone can reference, and if something is in violation, there should be a way to flag that post.

That only incentivizes people who have all the time in the world to disagree on the internet. Most users with expertise just don't have that kind of mental-bandwidth to spare. Just as it is not worth your time to get into a verbal argument with flat-earthers, its not worth your time to comment on most posts that you disagree with.

I like that a comment requires at least one comment before a downvote. Maybe not a comment for each downvote, since that might encourage dogpiling. Imagine a new user makes a social faux pas and suddenly receives ~4 relatively negative comments.

I initially really liked this idea. I think the only problem is that it could lead to requiring more moderation. It's very hard to enforce quality. Right now I'm imagining a bandwagon chain of "You suck!" or other low quality comments just for the price of downvoting. I guess you could impose a minimum character requirement. At any rate, the idea of it being visible only to the user being downvoted is somewhat novel as well.

Removing content from a discussion IS moderation. That's why the idea is tying a 'reason for moderation' (the reply, or any reply existing at all at least) to the moderation action.

Such a moderation comment might be anything, but the more egregious examples:

Illegal content (of some sort); A threat upon persons or property (E.G.); Hate Speech; other things that a reasonable person would agree do not belong with a discussion; or just being Wildly off-topic.

Having to work harder at moderation seems acceptable to me. And it'd be fairly simple to implement a "You can't just say 'you suck' when downvoting. If you do, you lose your downvoting privileges permanently." policy.

To expand on my thoughts a bit, my goal with voting would be to get people to actually engage with each other. That's the whole point of a community site. Adding "points" is just a way to encourage more engagement.

With that in mind, I'd likely just not have downvotes period. If something is low quality enough to deserve a downvote, then it should be in violation of my community standards. Downvotes are designed to stop engagement. That's not the kind of thing I'd want unless it's something bad.

Then maybe do something a little different with upvotes. Say after you upvote with a comment a certain number of times, you get access to a quick upvote option. Or canned upvote comments.

And maybe general comments would count as an upvote unless you uncheck the box. That way we could keep generic upvote comments like "well thought out argument" or "he used good references" in their own little section without stifling good interactions.

> Not a very good way to encourage a diverse culture

I'd guess that's the point - giving power over visibility to users who've proved themselves in line with the forum zeitgeist helps maintain a site's culture as-is and prevent it "diversifying" into Smaller Facebook #50691.

Comment and explain your downvote, you'll likely be downvoted for doing so, or be accused of trying to be a mod, or waste your time explaining yourself to someone who wasn't even interested enough to post a substantial comment in the first place. The main reason I downvote is "low quality comment" which is subjective and I don't want to enter into a debate about arguing that it is against the author arguing that it isn't; it's a voting system, I vote, you vote, we all vote, and a consensus comes from that. I don't want it to be "my judgement is better than everyone elses", I want it to be my vote among many.

(Or rather, I do want it to be "my judgement is better than everyone elses, and I want to be able to delete other people's comments", and I recognise that's bad, and that a vote system limits the maximum damage I can do to one vote per comment).

What I find interesting is that users voting on other's comments seems to have become the assumed best way of organizing user-generated content. In my mind, I think the question isn't "do we allow or disallow down votes," but "should we even let users vote?"

My impression is that voting systems ultimately end up as popularity counters, and that in and of itself can skew the motivations of participants. Additionally, there's motivation to maliciously hide opposing viewpoints, late-comers rarely get to meaningfully participate due to their "score" starting lower than longer lived and thus higher scored content, and well-intentioned discussion about contentious or nuanced topics can easily get buried.

What the "best" way of sorting user content is will surely depend on the goals of the platform, but if deep, informative discussion is the goal, maybe using a popularity contest isn't the right strategy? Perhaps giving the users choices of sorting by new/old, most/least discussion, most/fewest replies, etc... might be a better option? And/or some other non-vote driven method? Of course you'll still need good moderation and a way to flag inappropriate content where a user's ability to flag is kept in check by some combination of the length of time that user has been active, his/her level of participation with the platform, and the number flags said user has received, but overall I suspect this would keep the general user's focus on having actually productive discussion instead of trying to get that dopamine hit from making a well-liked comment.

I should also say that I've been mostly pretty pleased with the quality of discussions on HN and I appreciate the good moderation and the general populace's desire to share quality information/opinions/thoughts. But I do wonder what will happen if it becomes "too" popular and if there are things that could be done to keep that focus on quality discussions even in the face of a massive influx of users.

(2009), by Jeff Atwood. I would have been very surprised to hear today's Stack Overflow staff talking about the value of downvoting.

Atwood's experience with downvoting on Hacker News is definitely a bit dated as well:

> (update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. It is buried in the faq)

> (I apologize for my misunderstanding, but there’s no visible UI for downvoting, and I can’t recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in all the times I’ve visited Hacker News! Also, I put these comments in parens to make them extra-LISPy so Paul Graham would see my corrections.)

You might be surprised: https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

There's been a couple of blog posts from the SE staff trying to move the needle on how close/downvote happy the community is.

Sorry for the confusion, I was referencing how it would be unusual to hear SE staff today talking about why downvoting is an important quality-control feature and how it can be made more useful and more helpful for new users, rather than just condemning downvotes as hostile. In fact, the blog post you linked was at the forefront of my mind as an example of SE staff not "getting it."

Stack Overflow's moderation system has not scaled very well; it's unhelpful for new users, and frustrating for power users and volunteer moderators. The company has largely refused to address these issues since about ~2015, when they promised a series of grandiose moderation overhauls and...never implemented any of it.

Since then, their usual strategy for dealing with moderation failures is to throw the community under the bus. The article you linked caused a lot of drama within the community, because it accused volunteers of "judging users for not knowing things" for performing basic moderation tasks like marking questions as duplicates -- a feature that's supposed to help users by pointing them to an authoritative answer. The duplicate feature has a lot of warts; it does not adequately explain how users can nominate their question for reopening by clarifying why it's not a duplicate, and even if it was discoverable the reopen process is horribly broken anyway. But instead of addressing the obvious issues with the moderation system, they just wrote a blog post about how hostile their volunteers are.

A longtime SE power user explained it better than I could: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777

> For years, you have been working on cleaning up an oil drip out of a beautiful lake with a spoon, but the small spoon you have is actually a fork. You've spent years asking for at least a spoon to work with, but have gotten nothing. For some reason, though, you keep at it with the fork, for different reasons - some are the people next to you also working with forks, some are the occasional diamond that you can clean and set and make nice - all for free and out of your own time.

> Then, one day [...] the lake starts shouting at you about how the fork you're using is being unfair to the oil - that you're being too unwelcoming to the oil and not treating it properly, completely ignoring the fact that you've been using a fork and have been asking for better tools for years. The lake slaps you anyway.

In fairness: within the last year or two they finally seem to have hired some staff members who finally get it and are taking steps towards actually fixing the site's moderation problems. However, I haven't been on the site for a while and so I couldn't tell you whether they are actually having a meaningful impact or just making more empty promises.

> "In fairness: within the last year or two they finally seem to have hired some staff members who finally get it and are taking steps towards actually fixing the site's moderation problems."

That is such a time frame to choose; right in the middle of it, 1 year 6 months ago, the Monica incident happened[1]. Do you mean before that or after that?

In summary, StackOverflow said they were discussing a code of conduct that would mandate volunteer moderators use someone's preferred pronouns. Monica, a widely respected moderator, asked if she could continue using gender-neutral language under the proposed code of conduct. They kicked her out alledging (incorrectly) that this was a statement of intent to break the rules they hadn't brought in yet. Then 50+ other moderators stood down in protest[2]. Then the company doubled down on their decision and their following silences. This unravelled into a lot of people voicing their discontent with the way the StackExchange company interacts with the volunteer mods and the community, and builds on the back of the ~2019 one-sided changes to try and make the community more welcoming to new users by being harder on the people who are already the community, and how badly that went down, and company employee leaks saying the company is not engaging with the community, and an apparent increase in pushing for money to return to investors rather than any other mission.

Right about the same time, they retrospectively relicensed all questions, answers and comments ever submitted, possibly illegally, and then refused for a long time to comment on it.[3]

[1] https://judaism.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5193/stack-... and a related post covering other things the company has done fairly badly ~1 year ago - https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/342950/

[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333965/firing-mods-...

[3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

> there’s no visible UI for downvoting

For you. I see two arrows - one for upvoting and one for downvoting - next to every comment in this thread.

[edit] Haha, somehow missed that this was a quote from the article, sorry :D

Except this one :)

I've been downvoted to [dead] before, though I've never gotten mad about it.

One trend I have noticed is that on HN you won't necessarily be downvoted for your idea but you definitely will be downvoted for how you present it. If you come off as vitriolic or angry, you can expect a proportionate response. Frustration seems to be tolerated intermittently.

I wish downvoting harder. I'd prefer a system where down voting requires selecting or writing a reason on why you are downvoting.

You can definitely be downvoted for ideas here. Comments that go significantly against the political norms of the site seem particularly prone to this.

Whilst that us true, I think many of these comments are combative, argumentative, or implying more than arguing.

I think a thoughtful and compassionate but unfavored argument here will not be downvoted to death.

That is a higher standard than what the accepted political stances face. But it feels better than what is achieved in any other place.

In my experience it's really the presentation more than the idea. I rarely see a well-reasoned post get modded down. It's usually snipes, sarcasm (my own guilty pleasure, I admit), or a poster repeating the exact same argument multiple times without engaging any of the counterarguments.

> Comments that go significantly against the political norms of the site seem particularly prone to this.

Agree, but notably, the political norms of the site are not distinctively left or right wing. There are any number of opinions that will get you downvoted here (unless your comment flies under the radar), and it really does not matter how thoughtful you are about it.

Example 1 (right wing): opposing gay marriage or abortion rights, opposing taxes, support for Donald Trump

Example 2 (left wing): anti-capitalist views, arguing that Richard Stallman should be removed, general anti-startup culture sentiment, (usually) opposing Elon Musk / Tesla

Example 3 (which side gets downvoted depends on who's awake): your opinion of Brandon Eich, universal basic income, your opinion of Apple (particularly socio-economic), unions

It's really not that surprising; the median Hacker News user is a white American man, wealthier and younger than average, with moderate liberal political views that skew libertarian on social issues. That's a "norm" of discourse even if it doesn't fit perfectly on the American Republican / Democrat spectrum.

> It's really not that surprising; the median Hacker News user is a white American man, wealthier and younger than average, with moderate liberal political views that skew libertarian on social issues. That's a "norm" of discourse even if it doesn't fit perfectly on the American Republican / Democrat spectrum.

I doubt this is very true. Last I checked from what dang said less than 10% of HN comes from Silicon Valley and it has an increasingly global presence. Secondarily, your use of race, age, and gender are antithetical to good analysis. These categories are not monoliths and it's insulting to refer to them as such. The way you categorized the politics of this site even seem out of touch from my experience.

I like the idea of paying to downvote, but also an interesting effect of downvotes is that they skew views of a position.

Having one upvote and 100 downvotes is the same as having 401 upvotes and 500 downvotes. Isn't that odd? One is a comment everyone hates and the other is a comment almost half of all people like.

what you're getting at is that both the mean and the variance have information (they're independent variables), which is good to keep in mind. on hn, both of your examples would be at -4 (dead) with no way of differentiating the two.

> "I like the idea of paying to downvote"

This reads to me like charging people to pick up trash while they're out walking. Voting is a mini-act of trying to improve the site for others by sweeping trash comments down and out of others' way and lifting good comments up to prominence; who would pay to do that? Who would think it reasonable to expect people to pay to do it?

> We’ve lost half the potential information. If a post has zero upvotes, does that mean it’s bad? incorrect? uninteresting? mediocre? There’s no way to tell, because zero has multiple meanings.

Having downvotes doesn't fix this problem. You still loose information. If a post has zero upvotes, does that mean nobody cares, or a lot of people love it, and the same number hate it? The only site that gets this right is youtube: It shows both likes and dislikes.

I believe they're playing around with removing dislikes

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358992/youtube-hiding-d...

> The only site that gets this right is youtube: It shows both likes and dislikes.

That might change soon: https://mobile.twitter.com/YouTube/status/137694248659415040...

The title should say that this was 2009.

And I think that HN has held up pretty well over the years.

I noticed the pub date when the author says that maybe HN gets away without downvotes because HN is young, founded in 2007. I am glad the author turned out to be wrong.

One thing I noticed recently about HN voting is that it seems like you can upvote but cannot downvote immediate replies to your own comments. Other users can still downvote the comments. When I noticed that it struck me as very clever and something reddit should immediately poach. It's like a built-in cooling off period.

Personally I'd prefer if comments displayed upvotes and downvotes as separate tallies instead of a total. It means something very different if a post as a lot of up and down votes that sum to about zero or if it has no votes at all.

Imgur is a great example of this at work.

I think one obvious problem with downvoting where downvotes automatically hide content is that it creates echo chambers. The downvote button is definitely a 'disagree' button here and I think it's not really conducive to great discussions.

Then again, this isn't really a forum - it's transitory comments about the news of the day. Perhaps the argument is that there shouldn't be substantive discussion here in the first place. You're clearly meant to respond to the article more than the individual comment - the tree style commenting system and automatically hidden nature of comments down the chain both speak to that.

I’m not sure I agree. I tend to say things that are somewhat controversial on HN, and if I said them in San Francisco I’d be liable to be tarred and feathered, being a Libertarian from Kansas, but I try to be diplomatic and haven’t yet had a comment that’s gotten hidden. I think people are fairly charitable as long as you’re presenting a cogent argument.

I always show dead comments and honestly, people aren’t missing out on much. To get your comment dead in my experience you have to either be extremely inflammatory or just spout absolute nonsense.

I think HN does it better than reddit, where the comments are hidden quickly once negative, but I've seen a lot of comments edited based on downvotes as people wonder what, exactly, other users are disagreeing with. Doesn't exactly contribute other than to say 'your opinion is wrong.'

I never comment on HN anymore, because, ironically, a site ostensibly promoting innovative thinking actually discourages it with mechanized "group think". And ironically I am breaking my rule to never comment, on the completely off chance the observation might sink in. FYI, the down button is right there, don't hesitate, you wouldn't dare want to ever take input that you don't completely agree with.

Last post ever, no really this time :)

OK, I will try one more time, but this is super obvious.

Simple:

If you downvote you have to give a reason, you cannot simply downvote, I can write a script to downvote every post on here everyday. You have to provide a reason for the down vote, and your reason can be upvoted or downvoted, but they have to give a reason which can be up or down voted and so on.

If you up vote, you have to give a reason, and your reason can be up or down voted but that up or down vote has to have a reason that can be up or down voted and so on.

Recursion. Get it? I don't understand why a site populated but programmers did not think of it, I have suggested it like a million times and it gets down voted, again for no reason given, for all we know a bot is doing it.

It is sort of an obvious thing, I am probably not going to try again because it is just too annoying.

Good bye.

I find the "I disagree with you so I'll downvote you" approach to comments is quite useless. Should require a comment in the very least if you have any concept of adding value. Especially in political discussions I've seen. Its blatantly obvious someone is downvoting simply because they disagree. That should be trackable and that type of action flaggable in itself. But I understand the overhead it would create.

Flagging without reason is likely equally obnoxious.

If the downvoted person nas to wonder about the reason "why?" then the system isn’t helping.

I've seen plenty of faded out, non-snarky, non-trolling comments that were actually on-topic and relevant. But enough people didn't agree. Making them hard to read just means I now apply a extension to find out why it is being blocked. Often the faded out comment is informative specifically because it annoyed or offended someone who disagreed.

Looking back at some of my own comments that were downvoted, I have no idea why it happened. I asked others for their opinion. They have no idea either. So what was their intent? I literally don't know why. No self reflection occurs because there's no clear reason.

Interesting article.

From my perspective HN voting, for the most part, works very well. I've been on online discussion groups since the days of USENET. HN is great.

What really bothers me is zero information down-votes and the "downvote army" as someone called it in this thread. Nobody learns anything from this at all. What's the value when a downvote carries no consequences whatsoever for the voter while delivering a penalty to the author?

One idea I had a while ago is that a downvote should cost the person money in the form of karma. Want to down vote? It'll cost you ten points. No problem.

The point of this idea is that a down-vote out of spite or just to pile on someone or an idea is a bad thing. People who behave that way with some consistency would have to give up more and more for each downvote.

Paying for a downvote with karma could be an interesting evolutionary solution for downvote abuse, particularly if the cost increases based on a range of criteria. You downvote a comment on a thread and it cost you 10 karma, you continue to downvote the same author on the same thread and it cost you more each time. If people are piling one, the cost goes up. Etc.

>I can’t recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in all the times I’ve visited Hacker News

That's interesting. I wonder how that could be the case.

While the treshold for downvoting has increased since 2009, the threshold hasn't increased to the same level that the number of active users (and therefore votes) have, so I would guess proportionally way more of the community has access to downvotes today than in 2009.

Also, I think in those days you did see vote numbers, but you didn't see the big obvious greying out of downvoted comments that exists today.

I don't have the ability to downvote. Is it possible to undo an upvote? I sometimes upvote a comment by accident when viewing HN on mobile.

There should be a clickable "unvote" above the comment if you wish to do so.

Regarding anything else about how Hacker News works, I found this quite useful:

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

Yes - after you upvote, a link that says "unvote" will appear above the comment. E.g. the following text currently appears to me above your comment:

Don't feel bad that you didn't notice - I was reading HN for a long time before I realised that un-upvoting was possible.

Accidental upvotes used to be a problem, but that's been fixed for a while now. You should see the word "unvote" appear https://i.imgur.com/jaNanv9.png

Downvoting is enabled when your karma reaches a threshold (500?). You can undo votes in either direction via the “unvote” or “undown” links that appear after voting. I think this is only possible for a short period of time after your original vote.

I guess there are a few more karma points to go for you. Not sure what the exact threshold is.

The UX is subpar on mobile. Too many tiny links too close to each other.

Jeff’s 2009 argument against HN is a theoretical one, and IMO wrong. He points at a system that works well (HN), and says it “gets it wrong,” for made-up and unproven reasons.

Paul’s point about not being Reddit, I think, is you need good moderation, and you need to be willing to block and ban. Despite this, Jeff assumes HN limits downvoting in order to not hurt people’s feelings or something, which is a total straw man or non sequitur.

From my armchair, I gather that good communities require good moderation, so if you are trying to scale moderation, that’s your work right there, and a downvoting mechanism doesn’t take the place of that. Ideally mods are people who have organically earned trust and power or are known and trusted by other mods or leaders. Karma scores alone don’t cut it. The mods can use tools to be more efficient and not require an army. If you are running a site that relies on mods, you need a good relationship with your mods and to give them good tools and guidelines.

I feel like Hacker News leaderboard was a lot more interesting in the 2000s than it is now. Can anyone put their finger on why this is?

I just downvoted your comment.

***FAQ***

What does this mean?

The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Red-I mean "hacker" "news" 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 Posters,

*Spreading incorrect information,

*Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a `/s`.

Am I banned from the HN?

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. If you accrue enough down-votes, dang will be forced to hellban or IP-ban you, which will completely and permanently prevent you from using the website whatsoever (until you get another account and IP which takes like 2 minutes).

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 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 news.ycombinator.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: HN is privilege, not a right.*

Hacker News gets it most wrong with the flagging system, which is ripe for abuse (and is constantly abused). I sent this to dang some time ago, and was met with a muted response:

I realized something interesting the other day - users gain access to downvote comments once they reach 501 karma. I've always inferred that this is to make it so that users cannot downvote until they have demonstrated some understanding of the community and an ability to fit in with its norms.

However... users get access to flagging at 31 karma. A flag is basically a super downvote in several respects:

- It works on comments and posts

- It works on direct replies to your own comments

- Just a few flags is enough to remove content entirely

- A flagged post cannot be vouched for until after it's been removed, whereas a post can be upvoted before it's downvoted.

It's a bit weird to me that the OP version of downvotes is available to users 16 times sooner than the neutered version. I feel like HN has a problem with flagging being abused for censorship - this might provide an explanation.

Yeah, I think the guidelines should state that you can't just flag everything you disagree with, there should be consequences for that sort of behavior.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836 May be of interest to you, notably the part about flagging privileges being removed if somebody is misusing the feature.

Speaking of shortcomings, how do people remove their account including all of their comments?

(Not saying that I want to remove my account of course, but perhaps one day I might)

EDIT: some discussion on this topic appeared here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898422

Personally, I think the "karma" and up/down voting of comments is a cool feature but they need to be taken with a grain of salt.

It's fun to see a submission get upvoted and get karma points and disappointing to see one get buried, and frustrating to see a post get buried and than another covering the same topic go big, but taken in perspective to what's truly important the points are trivial.

The main reason I visit HN most days, and generally several times a day, is to find something interesting and most days I do, and some of what I find and learn here is important.

I never come here looking for stuff to down vote. That's kind of hard to even imagine because you'd almost have to pass over the interesting and important to do that.

Be interesting to be able to see how many down votes a user has made. That could make one a bit less trigger happy.

Stack Overflow is certainly one to talk about this.

Last time I tried (a few years ago), voting in either direction required a minimum number of points there also.

These days, I accept the votes on S.O. for what they are, and hit the "End" key to read the least-upvoted answer first.

Like most comments here - I am a bit divided about the relevance and even the rationale of this article. That said it has given me a different twist on a sentiment I have been dealing with for a long time: I'm French but have emigrated to the English-speaking world 15+years ago (NZ, AU, USA). I have found the whole experience very challenging in terms of career management. Assessing my own progresses is something I really struggle with. For years, I was sub-conscientiously blaming my language skills (I have the worst French accent ever - when I meet new people they often ask me "when did you land" as I sound like a Tourist in a city I've lived for years lol).

I have since acquired more confidence language-wise, but it did not solve my 'confusion' (a la Travolta 404). I realized that what I was lacking was the negative feedback loop. I haven't had a long career in France before emigrating, but I had been through a large variety of student/casual jobs and a few short term engineering and project/program management roles. Enough to get accustomed to a French "professional context" in which I recall having professional reviews where negative feedback was given formally, and open discussions where employees would criticize the proposal made by a manager, or when a supplier was late in delivering - loud words would be exchanged on the phone. I haven't seen any of these in the past 15 years. Political correctness rules. Last time my temper took over and I inadvertently let a bit of my irritation be heard on the phone with a late supplier - they literally clammed down and it just added to the late schedule another 10 days of silence from them until they delivered. To quote Jeff Atwood - this is exactly the feeling I have at work sometime: "If a post has zero upvotes, does that mean it’s bad? incorrect? uninteresting? mediocre? There’s no way to tell, because zero has multiple meanings. [...] Downvotes give you the critically important ability to distinguish between the good, the bad, and the ugly. Without downvotes, how can you possibly tell the difference between a post that is harmless but uninteresting, and one that is actually wrong or harmful?"

Am I hallucinating ? I'd be curious to here about other emigrants/multicultural peeps' experience here.

Kind of ironic because HN still remains one of the most interesting and engaging communities whereas StackOverflow has become pretty insignificant, outdated, stale and very hostile and unfriendly to new posters.

It also has completely different use cases which makes the comparison a bit meaningless.

> The advantage of this system is that nobody gets downvoted, but at a steep cost: we’ve lost half the potential information.

A Mr. Claude Shannon would like a word. I joke, but when you have controls on voting rings and co-ordination, downvotes are necessarily noisier. An upvote is effectively neutral engagement with the content, where a downvote actively reduces engagement. From the perspective of wanting to mine the constructive engagement out of the collective minds of the audience, downvotes are about as meaningful and information dense as a fire alarm.

I thought about making an aggregator when you can only downvote, so that only "surviving" posts would appear.

In general most users don't upvote because they're not sure they agree with a post or article or really want it to have more visibility.

But I'm betting that most users would prefer to express their disagreement or negative sentiment if it was the only option, and say nothing about things they agree with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminationism

I assume that Jeff has changed his mind on this because Discourse does not have down-votes (with the caveat that Discourse has a different audience from HN). I wonder what made the difference?

He and Joel had this bullet-proof theory that, since quality answers are more valuable on SO than questions, the site should encourage users to criticize their peers.

So what presumably happened is that he noticed that philosophy, sound as it may be on paper, created a miserable atmosphere.

I would like the ability to see my ratio of upvotes to downvotes. I think it would help show me if I was applying the same zeal to promote ideas as I use to demote them.

Is there a reason to think that equality is important here? Could it be that promotion zeal should be e.g. 62% of demotion zeal?

It would be interesting to know if I am quicker to reward a good idea vs punish a bad one. No target in mind.

Hiding posts is incredibly useful. It's a good way to keep the blood pressure in an acceptable range.

I keep thinking that a script or an extension to auto-hide stories from blacklisted domains on the front page would greatly improve my experience.

The beauty of hiding, though, is that it only impacts my experience. If people want to discuss and vote up things I find uninteresting, they can have at it, and I don't have to know anything about it.

It would be interesting to have a downvote system where the downvote is added as a comment, giving the downvoter an opportunity to say why the post was downvoted. And also give anybody else an opportunity to downvote the downvote itself (with comment). In other words, downvoting a post might impact you if your downvote is downvoted.

I think the content at HN is pretty good. Some other novel approaches I have seen includes upquest.com which has voting based on where you think the score is headed. I think (as others have mentioned) downvoting introduces issues like for example downvoting articles around the one article you want upvoted.

I just wish you could remove the number next to your name natively in HN. It can't seriously take more than 5 minutes to implement this. There's no excuse IMHO. I want to interact with the site without seeing the number change and wondering why it did.

I can sympathize. I used to have a filter for reddit to eliminate the tally because I didn't like the effect it had on me.

I think the thing is though, HN and reddit don't give you options to remove these numbers because they have an effect. It's the nudge they give to people to adjust their contributions to be something the community actually wants. No shock these services are not offering options to turn that nudge off.

It might be nice of them to give the tally as class to make it easy to filter with a userstyle, though.

IMO that seems like a comment that hasn't aged too well. HN remains effective more than 10 years after that, and although he may have studied HN while building Stack Overflow, I don't think it's safe to say that SO has done as well.

I sometimes wonder if the simplicity of the upvote/downvote exposes it to the limbic decisioning, where some portion of the signal is pure lizard brain reaction vs a thoughtful act to help moderate the community.

Downvotes should be weighted by the voter history, e.g. someone who just downvotes should have vote weight say than someone who is more balanced.

I love the analogy that capping downvote values is like an ELU activation function in machine learning. Whereas Reddit uses TanH.

The downvoting works so well that there has to be a specific rule against complaining about it. That's an admission.

Imagine a stock market without shorting

This is a very confusing post after you take into account that the author misunderstood that actually you can downvote comments.

Ars Technica got this right.

The other big issue is the ambiguity of the vote: dis/approval, dis/agreement, or low-/high-signal?

I think agreement and interesting (signal) need separate votes. It could also be nice to have a hilarity vote that can be de-prioritized, allowing optional entertainment value without shunning it completely.

Also, flagging should be reserved for absolutely deplorable comments, not microaggressions or score-settling.

"It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic."

Paul Graham is such a tool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24099192

Somebody should delete this dumpster fire of a website, perhaps a real "hacker" might take the initiative some day!

To those of you addicted to Hacker News; I can offer this tip.

Get a Hellban. It's not hard after all. I'll probally get hellbanned over this post?

You will find you will still pruse HN, but very rarely will you feel the need to contribute. Your time here will decrease.

Hacker News does not need much improvement. It does seem like it's on the back end of it's business cycle though, like all current social sites? I used business cycle because I don't know the word for a social site's decline. Decline is too harsh a word. Maybe predictable conversations, and a bit of a echo chamber, is more appripro? Hacker News is still the best site for scientific conversation on the the internet though.

It seems like we have hashed out the important scientific stuff, and most issues computer related.

I'm so greatfull to the hard nosed scientists whom hang here, and take umbridge to unsupported claims. I really do appreciate you guys. You know who you are. You are usually the first one to comment on a study's flaw, or whether the Placebo Effect is rearing it's magical head.

Graham should add a few more moderators though. Never give too much power to one person, and an owner. This Plus--if Graham pays more Moderators, he could write off the added expence? It could be his gift to humanity? Oh yea, block a person, but do away with hellbanning. It's wimpy, passive aggressive, weak move. I understand moderation, but just block a person. Don't let them rattle on to open air.

I would like to see a few more political discussions though. Not a lot, but some. Maybe one every other week? Expose the political fakers, and hypocrites. Expose the political hacks on both sides. Track every dime both parties bring in by way of Lobbiests?

For those of us unaware, what is a hellban?

It's a ban designed to make it appear to the banned user that they aren't banned. The intent is to allow them to continue to post (so they don't make a new account and avoid the ban) unaware that their posts are unreadable by the rest of the community.

It works, but it's extremely controversial. It used to be the case that talking about it (and making banned users aware of their status) could get you banned here, and vouching for banned users wasn't available until relatively recently. Some users have only discovered they were banned years after the fact.

For many years now, we tell users that we're banning them when they have an established history on the site: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Shadowbanning is mostly for spammers and serial trolls. There's lots of past explanation at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23686672 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

I think vouching dates from 2015.

If anyone sees a banned account that's posting good comments, they're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com. If the account has really corrected its ways, we're happy to unban it. Occasionally we notice one of these ourselves and unban it. It's on my list to look at the oldest banned accounts that are still posting; I just haven't gotten to it yet.

> It's a ban designed to make it appear to the banned user that they aren't banned. The intent is to allow them to continue to post (so they don't make a new account and avoid the ban) unaware that their posts are unreadable by the rest of the community.

How is that distinct from a shadowban? Or is it the same thing?

> Maybe predictable conversations, and a bit of a echo chamber, is more appripro? [...] It seems like we have hashed out the important scientific stuff, and most issues computer related.

I think you're totally right with the first sentence I've quoted. The second has some truth to it, but I think it's a more personal effect than you seem to be acknowledging.

The most common complaint of long-time forum members is that the signal-to-noise ratio has gone down. In reality, the signal-to-noise ratio could stay the same, but for any individual community member, we will personally find less signal in the noise. The discussions will inevitably become predictable to us.

When we first join a forum with a particular focus, we likely have an incredibly incomplete view of the topics being discussed, or at least that community's interpretations of those topics (some of which might change our mind). We'll have lots of epiphanies. We'll connect a lot of dots that we hadn't connected before. We'll have real world experiences that we can anchor to discussions in the forum, allowing us to bring our life context into the forum and the forum context into our lives.

Over time, though, we'll be learning less and less from the forums. The forum discourse can initially advance somewhat as we come to useful consensus on some topics, and as the earlier members have more life experiences. For any forum that allows new members, the discourse is bound to hit a steady state of much more slowly evolving discourse. In the long run, forums likely evolve at roughly the same rate as society as whole.

The forum still fills a very useful function for those new starry-eyed members who have a lot to learn and much room to grow. For them, the adventure and discourse and overall experience is nearly as good as it was for the early forum members.

Meanwhile, those early members continue to grow at human rates, not society rates. We outgrow the forums. We start to see similar points over and over again, ones we've already argued to death and assessed for ourselves. We've personally experienced supporting and contradictory anecdotal evidence for many of the forum's consensus viewpoints. The "signal" at this point mostly comes from discussing entirely new events in the forum's focus area. The sorts of things where you might say, "I wonder what HN thinks about this?"

Therein lies the rub. As we personally have discussed to death the technical topics that drew us to HN, we almost wish to give "the HN treatment" to broader areas, especially philosophy, politics, and other current events. But we are not experts in these areas. It might feel exciting to us to discuss these things with our peers, but to anyone looking in from the outside, we're a bunch of bumbling idiots who think we know it all. If these topics start to dominate the conversation, the forum is no longer interesting to newcomers. Foremost experts in these areas have little reason to visit the forum, so any advancing discourse is much slower than it was for the original forum topic.

Sorry, I'm kind of thinking out loud in this comment. I guess my conclusion is that it's probably best to strive to keep the forum on topic, even if it gets boring for the oldtimers. I think it's totally fine for members to realize they've outgrown the forum and move onto other ways of spending their remaining time on this planet. We can take some satisfaction in the role that we played in the forum's early growth, and we can be grateful for the role that it played in our growth. And we can let the next generation muddle on in our stead, experiencing their own adventures while moving the center in their own direction.

Belief in Downvoting seems to be an artifact of idealistic naivete (that I used to have as well), in the same way as enthusiastic, unquestioning belief in the writings of Ayn Rand, Karl Marx etc (not calling anyone out, everyone was a teenager once). Downvotes SEEM good on paper. In the real world, they're garbage because they're never used as intended.

Nearly every implementation of downvotes assumes they will be used as a way for ordinary users to moderate bad content, and that this power will not be abused. The reality is that we've known mob rule was a terrible idea since at least the Enlightenment era, and probably much earlier. But apparently we need to keep re-discovering it.

There is a certain kind of person that mostly likes to attack and destroy, in any given situation. Not for any good reason, but simply because they like conflict. Give them a downvote, and they'll latch on to it and destroy communities. Give them only an upvote and they'll lose interest and go cause problems somewhere else.

Moderation is for moderators. Users cannot, and should not, be trusted with it.

>It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous.

The success of "broken windows" policing is not supported by much evidence, so the rest of article based on this concept is suspect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...

I have no opinion on New York and its implementation of the theory but I think it's indeed very clear that the theory applies to community management.

I manage an instant messaging community of about 10000 stem professionals and you can see negative community feedback loops develop or die down in real time depending on how you act on them. It's evident new members take in the vibe when they arrive and act to reinforce good or bad trends. If you let people make crass jokes, soon they're posting rude comments then insulting each others. If you let people post memes about technical topics, soon it's random tiktok videos, then it's porn. If you let a regular member go off on a newbie who asks a bad question, the next thing you know people are bullying newcomers left and right.

All I wanted was to build a nice virtual gathering spot and meet cool people but now I have to play fascist because the feedback effect is so strong.

Most of the criticism appears to come from misguided CRT roots. Thus the criticism itself is suspect.

Except, of course, you can downvote comments.

So umm. Kinda missing the mark eh?

I used to read Coding Horror but stopped paying attention to Jeff Atwood after his anti-coding rant. He repeatedly insisted that "learning to code" is a really dumb thing to do unless you intend to make a career out of it. A really shocking opinion that I was surprised to hear from him, and made me lose all respect for his coding-related opinions.

At least he has opinions. The "everyoness must code" folk sometimes do sound like markov-generated text. Funny that you hold his coding opinions in less respect for what is most decidedly a not coding-related opinion. Substitute coding for "advanced mathematics", "investment banking", "nursing".

Would you lose respect for a professional nurse's nursing opinions if he said learning to nurse is a really dumb thing to do unless you intend to make a career out of it?

An alternative analogy would be "learning first-aid is a dumb thing to do unless you become a medical professional."

I wouldn't lose respect, but it is a narrow view, and one worthy of debate.

"Programming" is such a powerful tool for everyone to interact with technology and we could do a better job exposing programatic abstractions. Think of how many people use spreadsheets with complex expressions. Is that that not also programming?

Basic mathematics, personal finance and first-aid are things everyone should learn.

Same thing for coding. It is unreasonable to ask everyone to write a compiler or anything on that scale, but I don't think that fizzbuzz is too much to ask. Computers are part of our everyday life now, and teaching the basics of coding early-on can help demystify them. I also think that like maths, it promotes a rigorous and logical way of thinking that can be useful in other fields.

Not the parent commenter, but kinda, yeah. Saying that it's stupid to learn x if you aren't going to monetize comes off poorly to me. So does saying that everyone should learn x. I don't understand either view.

Is it weird to have an interest in nursing and learn about it but not be interested in monetizing it? Sure, it could be. Is it dumb? No.

I have no opinion of Atwood and am unfamiliar with his work. But a single opinion/rant made you lose all respect for a person?

I see this sentiment a lot on HN. The fatal opinion minefield.

I saw something earlier today that said (inelegantly paraphrasing)

"developers read articles as if they themselves were a compiler, immediately stopping as soon as they reach a sentence they disagree with and then throwing a syntax error"

I think the same thing applies here

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