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.
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).
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)
The best thing to do here is for the community to step in and actively up-vote unfairly downvoted comments.
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?
Perversely, downvotes aren't available on comments older than 24 hours, but upvotes are, so comments that attract a mixture of up- and down-votes get a strong upward bias on votes they attract after a day (since the upvotes happen and the downvotes don't).
Not sure how relevant that effect is to more short-term issues, though.
Oh certainly, it's just that this seems eqally applicable to upvotes, hence why the asymmetry seems perverse.
Flagging operates similarly; as there is no reason attached to the flag it is simply 'dislike'. Slashdot's tags were much more nuanced.
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.
Partly this is a first-poster thing. If you post early, then you'll either get a lot of up or down votes. Take time to post, and well, might get nothing.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot's commenting/moderation system was exceptional.
Grateful to HN for the excellence of theirs.
I learned my lesson and try to only inject humor into otherwise useful comments on HN.
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.
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!