Hacker News Reader

Comment by greesil | Hacker News Reader

The 500 point karma limit should probably be inflation adjusted as well.

Karma doesn't accumulate linearly. I don't know exactly how it works, but certainly for articles I've posted it's true. It might get 300 points but your karma only increases by 200. I don't know if this non-linearity has changed over time, but it could certainly be used to achieve this effect.

And to be clear for others who are wondering what happens at 500 points, it's a threshold for being able to downvote, not a limit per se.

But then probably it should rather be the points that get assigned that would have to be adjusted rather than the thresholds?

Reason: if I e.g. got 1 point 2 years ago, that point had at that time more value (less users than today) than the 1 point that I might get today? (therefore today I should maybe get just 0.5 points per upvote instead of the 1 point that I got 2 years ago, depending on the difference of active users throughout time)

The other approach of just raising the thresholds would on the other hand impact all my points independently from "when" I got them, which sounds wrong to me.

Many years ago I learnt the difference between less and fewer, and now I can’t read or hear someone saying “less than” when it ‘should be’ ”fewer than”

It’s like Roko’s Basilisk. Or The Game (which I just lost), living rent free in my mind, offering nothing of value, yet immune from bleaching - indeed alcohol if anything heightens it’s power (and causing rambling asides, I think ki should go back to torturing myself with Lithuania’s Eurovision entry)

> now I can’t read or hear someone saying “less than” when it ‘should be’ ”fewer than”

Thank you! I love such corrections. I'll try to keep that in mind :)

> i should go back to torturing myself with Lithuania’s Eurovision entry

Hehe, I have that show running in the background - I was just thinking that the presentation of the songs got more extreme compared to previous years... . Sorry, I overlooked Lithuania.

Edit: saw a few seconds of replay of Lithuania - it seemed okay-ish (better than others).

memetic viruses are real. Infohazards should not be taken lightly.

What has been seen cannot be unseen. However, it's worth taking all that lightly because correcting people's grammar is a suboptimal social strategy.

I think that the downvote mechanism should just be removed and the flag cap moved to 500. It's just become a mechanism to remove controversial topics from conversation. HN used to have some very off-the-wall libertarian voices which incited some interesting conversations. Now everything just gets downvoted into oblivion unless you are Mainstream Approved

Another interesting point as I sit here and watch this comment literally 'fade' into the echo chamber. Why is it that HN signals immediately when comments go below the 1 point threshold, yet hides upvotes? It seems like HN encourages the bandwagon effect on downward pressure only

I do think the downvote button contributes considerably to shutting down things like pun threads and low effort comedic jabs. It's always sad to see someone who is making a good faith effort to have an interesting conversation get drowned in downvotes, but on the net I think the downvote does more good than harm.

From Dang :

> The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away.

> Flagging of comments is important, too. If you see a comment that breaks the HN guidelines, such as by being uncivil, you should flag it. But there's one extra hoop to jump through in the comment case: you have to click on the comment's timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top. That's a speed bump to dampen impulsive flagging.

I honestly think the opposite, downvotes are the perfect target for our knee-jerk lizard-brain response to things we don't like. Flagging and reporting are a much more community focused approach to moderation, requiring people to actually think about why they are removing a person from the conversation

> I think that the downvote mechanism should just be removed

Why? I think this approach makes an assumption that everyone is upvoting everything that they would not downvote. I upvote things I find interesting or insightful, and I do my part in terms of moderation by downvoting comments that don't have a good fit for HN.

What I see on Facebook and Twitter is that the inability for the hivemind to have some kind of downward pressure mechanism on comments encourages/enables polarizing comments by vocal minorities to rise to the top. I see this frequently in the comments on the posts of local political figures. The top comments shown are almost always controversial and unhelpful/unproductive - things like whataboutism, blatantly racist remarks, etc. Eventually I got tired of constantly catching myself up in arms over FB comments and stopped participating.

The only way I see to counteract this as a rank-and-file user is to upvote/like every single comment except for the ones that are hurting actual discourse. IMO this will drive away people that you ultimately want to be participating on HN.

You have an interesting point, that I think comes from our ill definition of why we have downvotes on HN and why we have flagging. Flagging, from what I can tell is for "a comment that breaks the HN guidelines" or "a story does not belong on HN". It seems like your downvotes for comments that "don't have a good fit for HN." would actually be better moderated by flagging, no?

Flagging blatant racism and other destructive argument tactics is also fair game. So what are we actually downvoting for?

I rarely downvote, but when I do it’s almost always for something that seriously detracts from a curious and open-minded discussion or is factually wrong about its main point (not “doesn’t match my opinion” but “provably doesn’t match the facts”).

I flag almost never. I probably vouch about half as often as I downvote.

I think I also downvote/moderate under similar circumstances, though I also fall prey to the exact kind of behavior that I'm calling out (flippant downvoting).

You point out a super important part of forum moderation : trolling and posts which "provably do[n't] match the facts". Aka. Flame-Bait

Downvoting is one way to moderate these posts, but the HN FAQ also mentions this type of behavior (suggesting Flagging as a solution) :

> Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Downvoting is a great tool to moderate posts, especially for users who wield the power wisely like a longtime user like yourself. But I don't think the 500 comment threshold is enough to sort out the wheat (you) from the chaff (me).

What's funny, is that HN voting is such a problem, it also dictates in the FAQ to not even complain about it!

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I go on and off with having downvote arrows hidden by default: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26165960

Makes for one extra step if I want to downvote.

Hah! I love that, we definitely share this same concern about how our lizard brains affect our actions

Or with uBlock₀ filter:

    news.ycombinator.com##[title='downvote']

Then for showing the downvote button someone can temporarily disable cosmetic filters from the uBlock₀ popup.

I see flag as something more along the lines of report on Reddit - I assume it raises the flagged comment to the actual moderation team (dang et al) for review & action against the user if necessary. I don't think it's worth flagging someone and risking their account over a bit of self-promotion, punning, one line jokes, or abrasive comments. I see downvotes as my chance to shape the conversation without jumping in to comment and add to the fire.

An example: a common HN trope is to comment something tangentially related to the linked article, but the comment isn't directly related, isn't an attempt to discuss the linked item, and comes off with a "hustle" vibe (check out my project that is similar, check out the company I created that solves the same problem, I wrote an article about this last year go to my website instead) rather than actual discussion about the article. Sometimes these comments come off as extra slimy, but I'm not going to flag someone for trying to get attention, I'm just going to do what I can to shape the conversation by downvoting in cases I judge as egregious.

Good point, and great example. That is a situation which I would downvote too, given the chance. Have you seen the flagging system lobste.rs uses? It's a lot more friendly than HN's black-box flagging (and also the only way to moderate). Everything that doesn't really necessitate being flagged is on the users to ignore and not engage with.

https://lobste.rs/about#flags

I think we agree on the effectiveness of downvoting as a community moderation tool. But, I just cant stand sites that use it. They all eventually turn into an uninteresting echo chamber; it's happening to HN, it happened to Reddit, it happened to Digg. Etc.

I personally think votes should only affect the order of comments. I am interested in reading down voted comments just to avoid the echo chamber effect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com