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Comment by Hiopl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

I think sites would benefit from having more rich voting options, for example: agree but weak-argument, disagree but well-stated, changed my view, etc.

Would yield some more interesting ways to sort and rank comments.

Very good idea. I wish I could mark your post as such. Then Dang could just filter by "good idea posts" and easily see how to improve site or world.

So basically, like Facebook Reactions and those post ratings plugins you can get for various forum scripts now.

Yeah, I think that would work. Especially if 'disagree' is a neutral reaction rather than a negative one, so downvoting for disagreement stops being a thing.

Build it and they will come.

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!

True, the greying out does tend to have this effect, then again, sometimes I see a greyed comment I agree with that I think was downvoted unfairly and upvote it where I likely would have just read their comment and not upvoted had it not been grey. I forget sometimes when I'm just scrolling through to be honest.

But, I do agree, systems with upvotes only works sometimes, it seems to depend though. On one forum I post on, they only have upvote equivalents, but it tends to lead to fairly quality conversation a bit like hn, though memes and jokes tend to get upvoted far more than here....or maybe without downvotes you actually get to see the upvotes on jokes, I dunno, I've made a few of those one liner joke comments hn frowns upon and watched it go up and down over and over until it settles between -1 and 2 depending I guess on whether more people found it funny or annoying.

But...with upvote only systems, you also get horrendous trash like Facebook.

Then again, with upvote/downvote systems you get decent places like hn and horrendous trash like reddit and SO(an over exaggeration to allow me to keep this paragraph similar in structure and phrasing to the last) so who knows what's best really?

I think in the end it always comes down to the community and the mods.

It doesn't matter what kind of point system you have, what matters is the people who are most involved in the community, the rules of the community and how the mods act.

There's a temporal dimension to downvoting too.

I notice sometimes a comment goes negative quickly. If it sinks to -3 then it is probably doomed, but if it only goes to -2 or less it can rise up again, if it has some form of logic that enough people can see, and isn't just a dumb or offensive comment.

Presumably the first two downvotes of a nuanced but serious comment sometimes lead to mindless followers taking it down to -2, which is a quick pile-on, but by then, it has reached enough views that it may be counterbalanced by people of the opposite view upvoting.

I have occasionally seen comments go back to positive from -3 too, although it is rare. These are invariably comments which state an uncommon position, which look like an unpopular trope, but which can be decoded by knowledgeable people who think it through and upvote.

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.

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.

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.

That's the horse of twenty-somethings, and their "older" cohort, who think being a jerk is funny. I've definitely done that way too much here at times, oops.

Still, it falls on the creators and maintainers of HN to do something about it.

I'd be interested to read any discussion in suport of down votes from the crew who run the site.

Horse. Deary me.

I meant horde.

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

The problem is that extremely low-quality comments (e.g. anything from "agree" and off-topic memes to irrelevant political sledging to the kind of thing that will get the user banned when a moderator sees it) are the majority of downvoted comments. Requiring a reply would give them long chains of unnecessary comments until they hit the threshold to be hidden.

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.

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.

It's more about the opinion relative to the overall context of the thread. As an example, if you try to defend or contextualise Facebook (the company's) actions in a thread about how much they suck, you'll get downvoted.

The same opinion in a different thread will probably just be ignored, because people self-select into threads based on what they care about, and the FB dislikers won't be so concentrated.

Nastiness and "can't you just" statements tend to get downvoted regardless of context though.

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.

if you don't mind my asking, why isn't it an easy thing for you to be on here?

I can't speak for the person you are talking to but this site has much less tolerance for deviation from cultural norms - which is both a good and bad thing.

Compared to even niche subreddits there is much less room for "freewheeling" (can't think of a better term for it) comments. It has costs but what for what you pay, you gain in a more serious and sober environment.

Its not serious at all, its a news aggregator that by very silly means filters stuff to the top that is worth reading. Serious is when you have skilled professionals pick the topics and an interesting debate is when preferably everyone disagrees.

I initially downvoted this. I've reversed that and decided to reply.

HN is bigger than it used to be which has helped introduce an Eternal September effect, but HN is the funnel for YC. You need an HN handle to apply to YC.

For people interested in starting a business and applying to YC, there is potentially millions of dollars at stake. Especially in the beginning when it was smaller, your comments here were used to help them evaluate your application to their seed funding and business mentorship program.

Lots of latecomers seem oblivious to that function and think it's just a silly discussion forum. But there are people who still know better and the people who understand that what you say here can make the difference between becoming the next Reddit (a YC company) or Dropbox (another YC company) or never getting anywhere with your business dreams help skew conversation here in a more serious and respectful direction than you are going to find on most forums that really are just discussion forums and that's it.

That's not what HN is. HN is the foyer you have to get through to have any hope of joining a large and powerful "old boys club" that has created many millionaires in a relatively short period of time.

Being an ass here is a good way to be politely turned away without ever knowing why: "Sorry, not YC material." Because they pick which applications to approve and fund primarily based on the people, not the idea.

That's not a secret. They talk about it incessantly. Anyone who doesn't know just hasn't paid attention to the huge volumes of info they put out about their application process.

Their "No assholes" rule is widely known.

> your comments here were used to help them evaluate your application [...] Lots of latecomers seem oblivious to that function and think it's just a silly discussion forum.

I see, it [apparently] may still have serious implications. I still consider a serious discussion to be one where you can be right and I can be wrong - politely. It is then up to you to enlighten. Next round you get to be wrong and ill be there to point it out.

> I initially downvoted this. I've reversed that and decided to reply.

The exception not the rule. Normally I don't reply if I disagree and you downvote.

Now that I think about it the downvotes should make an interesting data-set to judge the founders by.

I still consider a serious discussion to be one where you can be right and I can be wrong - politely. It is then up to you to enlighten. Next round you get to be wrong and ill be there to point it out.

That still goes on here. It just is a smaller percentage of the discussion than it was when I originally joined in 2009. It's less obvious, but still possible to find that here.

There are more people here who don't participate that way, so you need to be a bit more careful about whom you try to engage that way to avoid having it go pointlessly sideways.

It's harder to stick your neck out about such things than it used to be and I don't know how to remedy that. It used to be much more possible to have a vigorous debate and have both sides remain civil in a way I have never seen anywhere else.

Wow, I think my experience has been different. Redditors seem to pile on a 'wrong' opinion and downvote to oblivion, whereas HN seems more evenhanded to me. I'm sure it depends on the subreddit though.

Reddit does not pœnalize one for downvotes to the same extent.

On Reddit, if one's all time score be negative, one is throttled to one post per 10 minutes.

H.N. throttles to five posts per day if one's recent comments are negative I believe the number is that I've read.

> You need mechanisms for helping people learn "This is not welcome on HN. This is not how we do things here."

Can we use flags for this purpose?

Problem is even though a comment does not violate any rule, it gets down-voted as hell if you say something that majority of people would not like. e.g there are posts about hyped programming languages, go check out down-voted comments, most of them does not deserve to be down voted.

There some topics, these topics have “fan-boys”, so even a comment is constructive, it gets down-voted.

You already show disagreement with comments. If a comment violates a rule, we can flag it. If a comment does not get up-votes, it moves to bottom of the page. So, I think down-votes don’t add any value to HN.

As someone who gets downvoted probably more than average, I don't agree with you. Downvotes are the least problematic way for people to tell me they have some problem with my comment and minimizes the fallout from me having to try to navigate gender politics as part of the mix.

It would be vastly worse for men to only be able to express sexist garbage by openly attacking me and trying to find some plausible excuse for hostility that is sometimes rooted in "She won't date me!" basically.

I'm a very controversial figure in part because I am getting healthier when that is not supposed to be possible and the world generally has a big issue with me because of that reality. HN has handled my "disruptive' presence better than any other forum I've been on. I've been banned from several forums and I've had mods elsewhere tell me that the abusive treatment heaped on me by others that was a clear violation of the stated rules was not the problem, the problem was somehow my behavior.

Since I'm not making any of that up, I'm kind of painted into a corner here socially and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to not end up essentially murdered over it, like Semmelweis was.

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

I do everything in my power to behave in accordance with the rules and blah blah blah, but I'm a woman and HN was as much as 98 percent male when I joined and I'm getting healthier when that isn't supposed to be possible and so forth. And HN is the only forum that is able to cope with that constructively and help me talk to people who are knowledgeable about areas of science that are pertinent to my needs as someone trying to survive in the face of an incurable genetic disorder.

I say all kinds of things that are not "popular" or even socially acceptable and as long as I am not violating the rules of civility, the mods here don't have a problem with me being here and that's extremely unusual. Most mods are all too happy to just get rid of me as the easy answer to their problem while not caring that this is de facto a polite way to quietly commit murder against someone whose crime boils down to "I am a scientist who is doing cutting edge work and my credentials include I'm a former homemaker and spent years homeless."

It sucks to be me. It sucks majorly for a long list of reasons.

And most forums find me intolerable and HN is willing to let me stay and that's literally life saving for me.

So I feel strongly that I am the ultimate test case for how well their rules work. The entire forum can literally think you are nuts and you can say things here that people literally believe is you being a deluded fruitcake making shit up, and if you behave you can stay.

So I think they are doing something amazingly well that's incredibly hard to do and I'm a huge fan in part because it has helped to save my life.

I'm sure there is room for improvement. I'm also equally sure no one else on the planet does it better.

Even though I find myself in disagreement with some of your posts on here, I still value and enjoy your presence here. The internet shouldn’t be an echo chamber. HN has meant a lot to me too, so I can relate with you on that. Have an upvote, and an amazing evening!

I was struggling to respond to the GP in a way that explains it well, so it's fair to say that it's impressive you did. Thanks :)

Visually, the low contrast from downvoting is tiring to the eyes if it's longer than a short sentence or so. As the reader, I do not see why my eyesight should be punished for this purpose. There are some really good decisions in HN, but the visual representation is not one of them.

If you click on the timestamp, it shows up as black again. I do that often because I have very serious eyesight issues.

I get eye strain from looking a bright white pages, so I use a Firefox add-on called "Dark Background and Light Text", which lets me override the foreground and background colors of pages with my choice of colors. As an added bonus, it prevents the annoying graying of comments on HN. (Use the "Simple CSS" option with HN, otherwise the up/down arrows will not display.)

For those who are interested:

Add-on page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou...

Github repo: https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-...

> 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 certainly is not, one can verbally signal one's disagreement with a reply. I very much do not believe that it has anything to do with “signal” and “noise” which of itself are rather vague terms and I find that very often people will consider something “signal” simply because they already agreed with it before they read it.

I see no reason for comments to be “rated”, and I certainly see no reason to pœnalize users for lowly rated comments as I see plenty of them that otherwise provide an interesting perspective.

> 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.

“This is not welcome.” means “Ðo not disagree with what the nonrepræsentative portion of H.N. that votes thinks says.” and I stress that it is not repræsentative. — it yields more power to those that are willing to downvote something for mere disagreement and gives lesser to those that would not do so, in my opinion very much the type of person whom one should not yield such power to to decide what is and isn't welcome.

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

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.

Case against it being all about discussion though, my original comment has been voted down for some reason.

Please folks, just debate me or post a counterpoint.

I think at the very least tie ability to vote down with commenting. In other words, once the user has replied to the original comment, they can vote it down if they desire.

You might think this is a safe place, but I've come to just avoid commenting anything like this that might get "hive minded" into oblivion. I'm sure I'm not the only one. In that sense, it's safe place for a certain "kind" of people with a certain "kind" of opinion.

> ‘I've come to just avoid commenting anything like this that might get "hive minded" into oblivion.’

that’s exactly when you should be commenting, otherwise the community is lulled into false conformity. contentious topics require more diversity of thought and more considered words, not less. internet points don’t matter, just the food for thought that comes with broader discussions.

I know, that's why I'm suggesting it be tied to commenting. No comment, no voting down available.

The reason why I don't bother as much anymore is I assume if my overall points get too low, I probably get shadow banned (I can comment, but no one will ever see it, or something to that effect).

one of the neat little things about slashdot was that voting included a short reason, like 'insightful', 'funny', 'redundant', or 'offtopic'. then as a user, you had some control over the visibility of comments based on those standard evaluations. that seems more viable to me than requiring a full comment on each downvote (though i like the idea in principle), which would likely devolve into these one-word evaluations as comments anyway.

i wouldn't worry about getting shadowbanned unless you're constantly posting thoughtless and provocative craziness (which doesn't seem likely based on a very quick perusal of your comment history). i read with showdead on and find very few accounts being shadowbanned, and those that are continuously and blatantly violate hn rules (nevermind common courtesy).

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.

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