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Comment by crazy_horse | Hacker News Reader

I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it.

But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid, and it's worse when multiple people decide they want to play that game and then the site software decides you get less rights than everyone else...and you never get good feedback on why. Why would I participate in that?

It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.

If downvotes don't matter, if I should ignore them, then they should not exist. I'm tired of sites that build in pathological behaviors. I think we can do much better than downvotes. The world is not binary.

View on HN

It sounds like you have a lot more fear and assumption than experience here. In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted you? Are you sure you weren’t just wrong and didn’t know it? I’ve been wrong in good faith and gotten fairly downvoted for it far, far more often than I’ve been unfairly downvoted to death for something innocuous or positive and helpful.

I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it’s just not a common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an extremely high ratio of ups to downs.

> Why would I participate in that?

This is a good question, but you’ve constructed a straw man version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on how to start and run a business, for the threads where world experts and relatively famous people participate and comment, for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full side of things. Good luck friend!

Look, for what it's worth I agree. In my experience, HN is welcoming of my viewpoints. My karma is over 9000, so I'm not worried if a few comments get downvoted.

But that still doesn't invalidate what GP was saying. They perceive a difficulty in contributing to the conversation because they're afraid of being downvoted. You're telling them not to worry and that they'll be fine ... but it's still a legitimate concern for them and for many other people who lurk and don't participate in the conversation directly. And there are plenty of lurkers. In my limited experience of receiving visitors from HN on my website, the number of clicks is 100x the number of comments on the thread.

And this is exactly why Facebook doesn't have a downvote button. It's trivial to add it. I've even seen it implemented in internal versions. But it only takes a couple of bad experiences of being downvoted for a user to get turned off from the platform. TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.

What's more, this experiment of having downvotes does exist. It's called reddit. Plenty of people use it. If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great. Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?

> TFA does some handwaving about how it'll save democracy, but it's a crock of shit. All it does is make fewer people participate. crazy_horse tried to tell you that. The solution to saving democracy isn't reducing participation.

I don't see that this follows. Limiting participation is not just compatible with democratic systems, it's crucial. Democracy-the-system (the thing being "saved") has long built in safeguards against untempered application of democracy-the-concept. Constitutions, "upper houses", multi-branch government, representative democracy itself: the idea that the untempered whims of the masses are not a stable basis for govt is practically foundational to democratic systems.

Downvotes are even more egalitarian than the proxies that eg govt uses to temper pure democracy. This can make them a double-edged sword: they deter bad actors from causing disproportionate damage to a community (eg a troll starting a flamewar has a sizable blast radius), but they do so by the standards of the community. If the community's norms are "bad" by your definition, then deterring deviation from them is a bad thing. But there's no axiomatic basis for defining what "good" norms are, and the community's views (via downvotes) is a principled mechanism (again, the principle behind democracy).

IMO, the lack of any accountability feedback loop in downvotes alone means that it's a tough sole basis for a healthy community. The best fora I've been on have been on Reddit[1], combining the presence of downvotes with the "constitutional" approach of clearly-defined conversational norms (primarily civility and intellectual charity) and rigorous enforcement.

[1] I have a rule of not naming this family of subreddits on HN or other fora, because maintaining the community quality is a delicate balance and the average HNer would both find it attractive and utterly ruin it in large enough numbers.

Imagine thinking your comments are so influential that a mere mention from you will cause a massive influx of crass HN-ers into your beloved subreddits.

Lol, good one. I think it's a holdover from when the forum was a lot tinier, and discussion (especially on the topics it focused on) was a lot more suppressed in most other internet fora. While I don't understand your assumption that "influence" is required to spread awareness, you're probably right that the impulse is anachronistic now.

OTOH, clearly you read this comment, and if even one person like you was prevented from ending up on that forum, it's worth it 1000x over.

Please be generous with your comments. You don’t have to be crass to ‘ruin a place’. I’ve seen it happen just from sheer numbers. Even if the influx measurably improves the signal to noise ratio, just having more signal can make a place exhausting to participate in. Not wanting to risk any advertisement can be a very prudent thing to do.

I was being exactly as generous as I needed to be. This was a person who went out of their way to tell this thread "I belong to bunch of lovely subreddits and I'm deliberately not mentioning them so 'the average HNer' doesn't join". It wasn't even related to their point. They went out of their way in a footnote (!) to rub in the fact that we're so terrible.

> It wasn't even related to their point.

Your comment says:

> If the author could use examples from reddit to illustrate their point, it'd be great

My comment did the exact thing you had already complained about, and my footnote was explicitly addressing the reason for this gap.

It's an incredibly bizarre look to lash out childishly because you can't follow the conversation well enough to remember what you wrote in your previous comment.

FWIW, I agree and I hear both what you're saying and what @crazy_horse said. My perspective is coming from having lived through that perceived difficulty and hesitancy and come out the other side. @crazy_horse isn't there yet. I was terrified of downvotes early on, and I admit sometimes they still bother me. One of the reasons HN gates the downvotes, I believe, is so that you have time to go through the process of introspecting and reflecting on how you're handling yourself before you start reacting negatively to others.

For me, it actually changed my mindset before I had access to the downvote button. The result is that I think more carefully about how I phrase things, and also that I've never used the downvote (at least not intentionally, but it's easy to fat-finger these teensy buttons on mobile devices) because I remember how it made me feel, and because upvotes are usually enough to percolate the good stuff upward. Having said that, I've seen a lot of cases over the years where the downvote button did good things to a thread, it often does a good job of sorting by relevance and helpfulness, it often lets people know when they're getting out of line, and for me personally it helped me be a better commenter. But I first had to get to the point where I admitted I had room to improve, and that took time and some downvotes.

Lately I've been thinking about changing my personal policy and using the downvote button every once in a while, because over time I can see some of the upside to the downvote. So far though, I've often been glad that other people do it so I don't ever have to.

They’re also positing a conspiracy against them, with people making multiple alts to downvote their comments. It’s more than just fear: it’s an empirical claim.

That whatever they said was legit unpopular is vastly more likely.

I've actually had someone message me on Reddit (years ago) with several alt accounts that a reply I posted in a programming-related subreddit was wrong (it wasn't), and they were right, and they'd be mass downvoting my account. This was back when reporting actually did something I guess, because a couple of the alt accounts did get banned a few weeks later. Later another new account messaged me a censored screenshot of their bank account with a few million dollars in it and saying some crap along the lines of "I earned this money by selling a software startup, so I know more about C++ than you".

That's only one time I definitely know I was getting downvoted with alt accounts, but it really sucks. And now how do I know it hasn't happened several times since except with someone who doesn't have an inflated enough ego that they need to PM me proof of it.

Oh it does happen. But it isn’t the norm in my experience, both personally and in the communities I mod. I rarely see sensible comments having negative karma.

And my own innocuous comments tend to be “1” rather than anything negative. If downvotes rings were more common you’d expect more negative karma comments.

And I'm not endorsing this idea of them being persecuted.

But I am saying that their hesitancy is real, and is widely shared. It's an inescapable consequence of having downvotes. HN does it best, by gating downvoting privileges to accounts in good standing but even then it's not easy.

This is an idea I've been interested in since it came up last month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27582145), but I don't personally feel strongly enough yet to land on either side.

That being said, for all its faults, I would expect that reddit does indeed have more productive discourse than most other (non-HN) social media platforms, particularly Twitter with its enforcement of shallow/short-form comments. /r/the_donald is obviously an extreme example of an alt-right cesspool, but it's not obvious that it was less polite or constructive than the equivalent communities on other platforms.

"Like the thriving, polite, constructive exchange of ideas that took place on /r/the_donald for instance?"

I have never visited that subreddit, but since the rest of the world, downvote button or not, was also not really involved in a constructive exchange of ideas on that topic - I do not see the point here. Emotional topics are hard to discuss, if the people involved use it to vent out emotions and to evangelize.

Fewer people participating is the goal.

Fewer of the wrong people, yes.

This site is every bit as echo chamber, “curated”, and intentionally suppressive to anything but a specific viewpoint.

If anyone doesn’t think so, go make steel man arguments against climate tax policy and let’s see how that goes for you.

The up/down vote system is the tool to implement ideological purity. And here the gray/fade system is a bandwagon signal.

This is all known, to people on the outside of the “target audience”.

I agree with the GP commenter. It's not about everyone being against you. All it takes is just a couple people, or even one.

I don't particularly care about downvotes myself. But the lazy and incorrect drive-by responses, the ones where you can tell the responder did not even read your full comment... Those just really get to me. Enough to upset my whole day and making it so I have to put effort into not ruminating on it.

Should I care less? Definitely. But that's not so easy for me. So more than half the time on HN I'll write a full comment, read it back, and then decide not to post it because it's not worth whatever incorrect response it will get. I don't comment on Reddit at all anymore because it's not worth it.

I've been waffling on whether or not it's even worth posting this comment, haha.

I agree with @dahart.

The political threads were a special beast, where any comment that revealed your political leanings would get a deluge of downvotes from the opposition. The Tesla and Apple threads sometimes get a bit of this too. But the vast majority of my experience is that the downvotes I've received were well-deserved. Maybe I was just misinformed and propagating misinformation. Maybe I was trying and failing to be funny - and thus didn't contribute to the conversation or cultivate curiosity.

Low effort / incorrect comments don't bother me a great deal. Usually someone else comes along and downvotes those. If it's a thoughtful comment that I disagree with, I'll attempt to engage, if I think there's some value in putting the effort in.

With experience, you do get a feel for when comments just are not worth bothering with. If they are low effort / failing to contribute, downvote and move on with your life.

A community is very much the sum of the contributors, with spirit that stems from the guidelines and moderation. Without individuals putting something in, something more than what detractors try to take away, it couldn't exist and thrive.

So like I think this is kind the authors point. Downvote isn't going to solve everything but it is a tool that let people signal to one another of something being a miss. You can have spammers that downvote everything but like thats also detectable and can signal biases. In response to spammers, there is away to cancel out those biases with upvotes. And if there are spammers on both sides you'd expect to arrive close to 50/50 in which case that signals something to a read. If its 80% negative that also signals maybe we should understand why this is bad or why its to be avoided. However without a balancing force whats the difference of +50 and +1000? Both are positive even if the +1000 has 1000s of negative comments not everyone has the time to engage on a topic completely and +/- give a quick way to understand the content that should be engaged with on a deeper level because it is divisive. Without the tool not only would you never know the difference but you can never know the difference without engaging every topic at max effort which no person can do

I feel you on this. I rarely post online because there's about a 50% chance I'll run into hostile replies written in bad faith. Also, as I've gotten older, I've gradually grown into the realization that I don't need to justify my opinions to Internet randos. :)

(Even writing this I worry someone's going to tell me this is wrong somehow, but the objective function for my value of time has become very ruthless.)

32 minutes in and this has enough downvotes to be greyed out.

Way to prove his point internet rando's.

I can't downvote and don't care to, but have an upvote on me for expressing a valid opinion, which was proven true in less than an hour.

One problem on HN is, that downvotes aren't limited to the comment but include the commenter.

This is a reliable way to identify low value contributions this is less of an issue in a relatively small environment like hacker news where you can in most threads without grave difficulty read all the comments and every story on the front page if you like.

In larger scoped things you will have much more content than anyone could possibly consume and most of it is bad. Keeping score is a way of avoiding everyone having to go through the same pile of drek. Keeping score is only half as effective if you can only up vote. Consider two tallies of several contributions. First two bad contribution neither sufficiently bad to be worthy of being banned.

Contribution A: Imagine 100 people viewed, 10 people liked it, 70 people hated it 20 were indifferent.

With down votes: -60 Without: 10

Contribution B: 10 people liked it, 10 hated it, 80 indifferent.

With down votes: 0 Without: 10

Now consider a positive contribution C with fewer votes 10 for and 1 against.

With down votes: 9 Without: 10

Now something outrageous that attracted a ton of engagement based on how bad it is. Maybe they said we should raise corgis and kitties as meat animals! 980 votes to the negative and 20 to the positive.

With down votes: -960 without: 20

Without down votes A B and C are identically scored despite B being worse than C and A being much worse. Even worse D despite being horrible is scored the highest!

Not applying the karma of a comment to the commenter has similar downsides. You would be throwing away good useful information your users have given you.

That's a feature, not a bug.

I think it depends on the website. I used Reddit between 2012-2020 and I believe that website's community was ruined by the upvote/downvote system.

For me, what it always comes back to is this: A downvote is meant to indicate "this comment does not contribute to the conversation," but many website userbases misuse downvotes to say "I disagree." If upvotes/downvotes are proxies for agrees/disagrees, then the comment sections can get ugly.

I believe HN thrives despite the upvote/downvote system because this website is a little more mature than others.

Reddit's comment quality is actually better than it used to be, though I don't understand what changed. It's true that the #1 comment on every post used to be wrong or a series of unfunny jokes, and then maybe #2 was good.

Currently their main problem (which is unsolvable) is just that everyone uses it and so there's new teenagers to ask trivial gender war questions on AskReddit every week.

It doesn't hurt that new users also can't downvote by default, and that it takes nontrivial contributions to get that ability.

The HN downvote is also for disagreement

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

I think the downvote brigading is getting more frequent.

Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them.

Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.

Submission flagging is the main place it happens and I personally wish HN will not treat flagging as downvotes, or would just call it downvotes, or would have some sort of penalty for obvious cases of mis-flagging.

FWIW every time I have ever flagged something on HN it’s been a fat finger mistake on mobile. Probably a drop in the bucket but worth considering that the signal is still polluted even with perfectly good faith user behavior.

I’m entering grey beard territory, been on HN for years, and I still don’t know what the [-] button does. Is it a downvote? Or does it just collapse the parent so I can read more without clutter? You’d hope downvote UI would be more explicit.

You don't have the ability to downvote. It's a down arrow right below the upvote (up arrow).

[-] collapses the parent, you're correct. You can also unvote if you change your mind on your vote.

[–] collapses the comment and all children.

When logged in, I have upvote buttons on all comments, and I believe downvote buttons are enabled at over a certain amount of karma.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m... 501 apparently

It happens to me whenever I say something critical of any given specific country. USA, China, Russia, I get hammered with downvotes and flags. Make a positive comment, hammered with upvotes. It's frustrating.

If you say anything positive or negative about something people hold as part of their identity you're going to get a response. I think it's better that you get votes, instead of a bunch of emotional comments.

No, it is better to get comments, even emotional and not well written. Because with comments I might understand where I was wrong, or at least know where exactly my opponent disagrees with me, because it I could have written a wall of text, not every sentence of it is wrong.

Even a comment like "fuck you you are dumb bastard hateful shit" tells me much more than a downvote. With comment like that I know that the opponent is not interested in productive conversation, so I move on.

And if people downvotes because they are emotional, this is not the place where I'd like to participate in discussions. I'm interested in the grown up respectful dispute and the extending each other world view.

A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.

A place where everyone agrees with each other is boring and a waste of time.

If everyone agreed there would be no need for voting, or even for comments. Very rarely do people gang up and down vote someone to oblivion, usually controversial opinions are up and down throughout the day. Plus there is a max amount of karma you can lose from down voting anyway, I think it's 5. It basically only affects new users who are out of line, or are trying to be provocative. I think it's the main thing that keeps HN the best forum on the internet. Well, third best thing behind dang, and sctb.

edit: also, HN is generally geared towards less comments of a higher quality. The biggest example is that if comments exceed votes by a certain amount, the story is automatically dropped from the front page.

> Because with comments I might understand where I was wrong

Someone can disagree with you without you being wrong. If you think they are wrong in their response...what good is being done? If you both have intractable positions then more discussion on the topic is just lengthening scroll bars.

Additionally if I disagree with you or just think you're wrong I don't owe you any explanation of that. You don't have a right to my time because we disagree. It's not my job to convince you. I may choose to reply to you (as I obviously just have) but it's my choice entirely. You may reply back to me and I may never ever read it, I don't have any requirement to do so.

Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC / Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as an expected behavior, despite it being relevant to many "I thought Enterprise had more control than thins!" conversations.

I could see that happening if you are presenting it as a solution to some problem and the downvoters perceive it as an unrealistic alternative. As far as I’m aware it isn’t that easy to obtain.

>Curiously, just mentioning the existence of Windows LTSC / Windows LTSB used to get me four to five downvotes as an expected behavior

Just to be clear, you expect to get downvotes when mentioning LTSB? This does not match my experience, and I also made several LTSB mentions.

Well, my comment is already at -1, so yes.

Ideological issues get people to use downvote. Technical discourse is more civilized, upvotes are more likely than downvotes.

I agree, as long as you realize that vim/emacs, static/dynamic, frontend/backend, etc., are all Ideological issues, and not technical ones. :-)

...and jokes are generally not treated well either, unless it's Friday.

This isn't my experience. I occasionally make pretty strong statements about traditionally polarizing technical topics, and I find that people are a lot more likely to respect differing opinions than when talking about, eg, urban planning or politics.

Absolutely my experience too, tech is not really controversial.

But discussions on health, religion and culture that is where the downvotes are used.

If you can accept that premise, then HN is a great place to be. Reddit is just not in the same league when it comes to thoughtful, well-articulated discussions where you get some great insights.

> tech is not really controversial

Unless it is a topic about Rust and how it is better or worse than C++.

Try to make a claim C++ is better, and nobody is going to read your bullet point explanations, you just get tons of downvotes.

(I'm not claiming anything is better or worse in this comment, I only present an example.)

Weird. Saying the same thing a few comments down earned me several down votes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27983945

>In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted you?

If you write a comment that is against what the majority of the site beliefs you will be downvoted. If you agree with the majority you probably won't have experienced this.

I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.

I don't know that it is a specific group of people who do that, but it is consistent enough that I can pretty much count on it happening every time, and clearly since it earned more upvotes than downvotes the community did consider the comment somewhat valuable.

Granted you get hammered much harder on r/politics or r/news, but the problem is the same.

The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure they understand the community[0].

[0]: No democracy permits people to move there and vote right away. For native born citizens they have to wait 18 years to get the vote.

> The solution is also pretty obvious: randomly review downvoted comments and if they are downvoted for disagreement and not merrit, ban the people who downvoted it from future voting. For new users shadow the votes for a while to be sure they understand the community[0].

Even if you could objectively review that, HN doesn't have a rule against downvoting for disagreement, pg decided it was acceptable very early on and it hasn't been changed. (although plenty people think it should)

> I know that if I make a comment that is positive of bitcoin it will get to -3 or -4 in a very short time and then in a few days it will get to +2 or +3.

This down-then-up pattern happens on all sorts of topics here. Almost everything I post gets a few downvotes within two minutes or so, then inevitably crawls back upward as people actually read what's said. One change suggestion I'd have for HN is to disallow downvotes within some time of posting, like 30 minutes, give people a chance to read it, and decide whether it is truly not contributing to the conversation.

That solution is absolutely horrible. Now you’re asking a moderator to decide what has merit and what does not. Who are they to decide? If I down vote something, I don’t want someone coming behind me and saying you know what this down vote doesn’t have merit, so I’m going to ban him. Imagine if we did that in the workplace. Your disagreement doesn’t have merit so I’m going to exclude you from now on from these meetings. The older I get the more I feel that the people who are upset about their comments getting down voted, somehow need their opinions validated, or maybe it’s anxiety, but there’s something deeper going on beyond just a comment on a message board. What you’re suggesting is completely counter to a democratic society.

I am not proposing this for a democratic society, but for a message board. The goal of a message board could be to be democratic, or it could be to fulfill the idea of the guy paying to keep it running.

I assumed the latter, because those places tend to be places worth sticking around, and because this is definitely where HN falls in.

> If you write a comment that is against what the majority of the site beliefs you will be downvoted.

I don't think this is a regular occurence on HN. But on reddit? All day every day.

Personally, I often upvote posts I disagree with, because it is a good discussion starter or just generally a good comment/discussion/disagreement.

Agreed. It’s very out of the norm on HN.

On Reddit though, it’s the standard.

In the default subs sure, but if you're subscribed to those shitholes you get what you get.

The default subs are really toxic, for sure, but it seems like the 'shithole threshold' is a sufficiently large subscriber count. Especially when the subreddit gets the attention of the admins and powermods get pulled in.

Or even small subs that are against the prevailing opinions of the plurality of the userbase of all of reddit.

Those regularily get called out as "bad", "toxic" or "hateful". Or banned.

Which actually is the reason I got rid of my reddit accounts.

Every sub has its sacred cows that you can’t question. It just takes a while to figure them out sometimes.

Reddit and Twitter shows the endgame of online voting systems. I don't think HN is far off. In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering). I would also like the ability to turn off downvotes all together if I desired, or even just for some user subset.

This is different from Facebook or YouTube recommendations in that I get to experience the same diverse amount of content, but things particularly interesting to people I trust will be indicated without censoring all the rest of the content.

It’s probably not popular, but I always thought that Slashdot had the best voting system for comments or was at least on the right track.

SD has, for lack of a better term for it, a time problem.

If you post early you will end up +5/-1. If you post late you comment will be stuck at 1. People tend to vote on what they see first too. So the stuff at the top just ends up +5/-1. It does not really signal anything. The cap SD system only works if the group of people posting/voting is small, the story churn is low, and the votes are hard to come by. Soylent added in a disagree vote which was neutral. Which seemed to help some. But they also added in way more votes per cycle. On that board most of the 'disagree' though ends up with people marking -1 troll. Basically they accidently found people want to punish in some way. When the real vote should have been a disagree 0.

Up/down voting seems to work OK. But only if you have mods willing to mod and not push/punish anything.

I used to think that, but /. comments devolved into dumb jokes around 2003-2005. Which I think is the main reason that hn down votes jokes so aggressively. I do like the meta-moderator system. however, without holding back mod points to begin with there is no incentive to do it.

I haven’t visited /. for years so maybe out of date, but IIRC this was largely helped by separating voting from type - so even if a comment gets a lot of upvotes for being funny, my personal settings of “ignore funny comments” means I still get a decently high-quality signal, which is something I’ve not seen anywhere else

I know why people don't like them and I get that you are correct that it got pretty absurd on /. around the time period you mentioned.

But I miss the jokes sometimes. I have to resist the urge to reference Rob Malda when I'm reading HN occasionally.

Good the main issue with jokes is they're the text equivalent of a Meme pic or "look what I did" type post. Easy to consume content with little actual meat. They attract upvotes easily when accepted because of that lack of substance.

Without a culture that rejects them, they, by nature, rapidly overwhelm most communities in content if a voting system is present.

No way, that guy is the best.

> hn down votes jokes so aggressively

"if you insist on taking up my class time making jokes, please see to it that they are funny."

In my ideal world I would be able to choose to _only_ view upvotes and downvotes from a subset of users I trust and ignore everything else (trust subset ranked filtering).

I was working on a system at least slightly like that at one time. In fact, I guess I still am in the sense that I haven't officially abandoned the project. I just haven't had much time to work on it lately. The idea was, users vote (up and down) on content but each individual could set "attenuator" or "amplifier" values on other users, to personalize how that other user's vote contributed to their view of the overall score.

It's never been deployed at scale (to the best of my knowledge), so I have no idea how well it would actually work in practice. I still hope to find time to get the thing into a state one day where I can deploy it and see how people would react.

The idea of whitelisting users to even count their contribution at all had not occurred to me, but I might take a look at incorporating a mechanism like that as well, since you brought it up.

The problem with whitelisting users or even attenuation is that you would be able to determine the vote counts of individual users. But perhaps votes being publicly ascribable to users is not a problem. I think they're public by default on twitter.

Another interesting feature would be to set vote significance based on a subset of users from a given subforum. In reddit terms, this would be, maybe you trust the content or membership of a given subreddit more than you do the subset of all users, so you set the website to filter on `r/foo` user upvotes instead of `r/all` user upvotes.

There's a lot of potential here to let users craft their on miniverse of relevance and information filtering.

edit: this comment initially made claims that it looked like HN was removing climate change related content from the front page. I still believe this to be the case, but don't really have strong enough evidence to back it up. I'll wait until I have something more convincing before posting about this again.

Who knows, maybe I am just paranoid.

Do you have any examples of downvote-bombing simple claims that climate change is real? I'd be beyond surprised to find out this phenomenon is real, even just based on the demographic prior of HN.

No worries if not, I get that it's not a trivial ask to dig up an example.

Not climate change. But three days ago this is a bit strange. Article regarding to anti-vax and astroturfing. First submission flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946430 Lots of comments saying it is being artificially vote inflated. Second submission more objections https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951293 stating conspiracy voting. Not sure what to make of it. And just one example.

Thank you for the links, but I was asking about the (since-edited-out) claims that these comments were being downvote-bombed. Submission ranking is considerably more complicated, and is not what I was asking about.

Things generally don't stay on the front page for long. Your claim sounds pretty paranoid.

HN was the way you describe. But I think that it is becoming less so. I feel the difference from, say, five years ago. It's not the same. It's more strident, less thoughtful, more reacting by reflex.

My own suspicion is that, as HN has grown, it has become more influential, and therefore more worth manipulating, and therefore more people are trying to manipulate it rather than just participating in it.

I find it amusing but people will go downvote unrelated stuff once you offend them. I can tell because I’ll get a flood of downvotes across unrelated comments when I make a controversial post.

Of course that’s all fine. I have no right to participate in this community and the community has a right to behave how it does.

Or perhaps I’m just miscalibrated and I’m saying totally douchey things here (only provided for example reasons):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27952366

I'm just speculating here, I don't think your linked example comment was downvoted because it was douchey or because you offended people in other comments. In my experience, comments like your example are downvoted because they're "obviously" wrong or irrelevant, which is of course very subjective. Clearly you don't think your own comment is obviously wrong or irrelevant, but you were rebutting "people don't want to send cryptocurrencies in their messaging app" by pointing out how useful you find Venmo: an app that is popular for sending non-crypto legal tender.

FWIW I didn't downvote your comment when I encountered it days ago, but I do notice that comments that have very basic logical flaws in them tend to be downvoted without replies. Downvotes aren't just a tool to enforce civility. This is just my assessment of your comment, I hope you take it in the good faith that I intended.

Hey, thanks for the feedback. Have hit my rate limit again. FWIW the comment was upvoted and left so for 36 h or so before I made my other comment on “real engineers” being worse than software engineers because they kill people (which was rather flamebaity).

I don’t want to transform this into a discussion of the original but I specifically intended to mean that to imply that the whole thing is that crypto functions like M3 and that value transfer is the underlying goal, legal tender just being a tool. After all, we use IOUs commonly (Splitwise exists on this principle) and they aren’t legal tender. I felt there was enough there to make the connection.

But anyway, if you think it is a logically incorrect comment, that’s on me to communicate better. Thanks for the feedback.

Anyway, I can’t have this discussion any more with you, because I have to save my comments for the most information transfer (I have an account rate limit).

> is not even close to the norm here

Maybe not here, but he said here and Reddit. It's definitely the norm on Reddit.

> In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience.

My experience on HN is that it desperately hangs on the words you choose and the threads you visit. The lower the barrier to entry (social subjects for example) the more delicate and convergent things become.

Yes lower barrier to entry topics are expected to increase the noise, and also the number of participants, which makes patterns easier to see, right? Possibly lower barrier to entry also correlates with lower expertise too. I'm not sure this is unique to HN at all, and haven't noticed it being any different or worse here than elsewhere. I think we have lots of words and phrases and platitudes to categorize and comment on how people behave, one that comes to mind immediately is bike shedding, or the Law of Triviality.

> then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got

In HN you can send an email to the mods so they can take a look. Also the site may detect it automatically (the details are unclear, it's part of the secret sauce).

> because I'm not sufficiently ideological

Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.

Try to stick to technical threads, preferably if they have less than 100 comments. You will be happier.

I think you're missing the point of what the guy is saying ... He's not asking for tips and tricks to live happier in a downvote world. He's saying, I think, that downvotes are conversation stoppers and does not help us get to the bottom of things and they should not be the default were people form communities.

> ”Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong”

Maybe there should be a separate URL to view recent comments with <1 points?

/graycomments, or /controversial, or something like that.

I’d certainly use that to sprinkle some upvotes. There are often high-quality comments that get downvotes early for whatever reason. It has a discouraging effect even if it gets corrected over time with more votes.

> Avoid political threads.

Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political", this is quite impossible to do.

everything is political

Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere. People will try and justify it with walls of text about the oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue intersects with their politics.

It's not new; it's a variant of the 60s feminist activists' pronouncement that "the personal is political" or "the private is political".

Everything is political now. Remember a year ago when you couldn’t wear a red hat in public without fear of someone attacking you physically? People are being canceled, fired from their jobs, ostracized in their communities, because they dared to have an opinion that differed from the mob. It’s all political now, and there’s not much we can talk about that someone isn’t going to try to make it political.

This isn't a new phrase that came out of nowhere, I've seen it in use for a few years now. I believe it became more mainstream with this Ted Talk; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=171flckdKic

Name a subject or domain that involves people which isn't "political".

My love of my partner and my nephews and nieces. My enjoyment of art. My appreciation of the natural world. You can do a political analysis of those things, but they are not intrinsically political. Of course, some on the left believe that there is nothing that isn't political. But I don't think they're correct.

For lots of people around the world the ability to love their partner is a very political thing - homosexuality being illegal in a majority of Africa, and punishable by death in parts of the world.

We could quibble about this, but I don't think that makes their love political. The repression is external to their love of each other, not part of it.

In fact, it would be a diminishment of their love to analyze it purely through a political framework—which is one reason many people don't like "everything is political". It diminishes many of the most important aspects of our lives.

> The repression is external to their love of each other

It’s not very “external” when the police are breaking down your door to force themselves into the middle of your activities. It’s something you need to be constantly aware of - if you want to have love at all, then you need to thread it through the government’s loopholes; if you do it in public, you are “an activist”.

It would be nice if “love” and “government” could be cleanly separated - but for queer people, that seems to be a fantasy that only straight people have the luxury of believing in :/

You made it 4 words into your reply before using veiled political language regarding your relationship with whomever you are romantically involved with. "Partner" became common in the mid 80s because it was a way for gay people to refer to their love interests without revealing their gender.

You say that art and love aren't political, but that's only useful when trying to split hairs about the subject.

You're missing the distinction I am trying to make. The language may be political, but my love for my partner is not the same thing as the language I use to describe it. It's why this conversation is important: we are not merely symbol processing units, we are human beings with perceptions and feeling that are not entirely mediated by language and politics.

That may seem to you as if I am splitting hairs. For me it's one of the most important distinctions in the world, and one that is lost when we insist everything is political.

I'm not missing anything.

You sit there and you tell us that there are things that you enjoy that cannot be described in a political manner. Nobody has ever suggested that your love for anyone is directly political.

Where you can live, who you can openly love, what jobs you can hold, what education you can have, what art you can view, and who you can fraternize with... these are all impacted, sometimes substantially, by political decisions.

Love is not some tangible item that sits apart from the rest of lived experience. It is created and nurtured THROUGH that lived experience. You love your partner in the way that you do because you have the freedom to do it. Your perception is colored by the free society in which you live, and by the attitudes of the people within that society.

I have a black friend from high school... a nationally celebrated former athlete, who started dating another high school classmate of mine in college. As soon as they were able, they moved away. She was a white girl with a black man, and even people they had grown up with were uncomfortable with the pairing. Her friends literally sat her down and informed her that her kids would look like her father, and didn't want her to experience the sort of emotional distress that a parent of a black child suffers when living in society. The negative attitudes of people around them at the time forced them to leave the state.

Most of my gay classmates also moved away, all to California, for similar reasons.

You're spot on. All of the things the GP mentioned have people literally fighting political battles to continue enjoying them. I find the GP's thinking common with people who haven't experienced friction doing "normal" things most people take for granted.

Was the art you're enjoying created in a vacuum? Art is often extremely political.

Me taking a shit? :)

Is it right for you be taxed for using the sewer system? What are the environmental impacts of the massive scale of human shit having to be processed in treatment plants? Why does the government prevent me from shitting wherever I want, infringing on my freedom? First they take away your rights to shit on your neighbour's porch, then they take away your rights to see your kids on weekends. Stepping stones to tyranny.

You're demonstrating that everything can be made political by those who want to take it on a political tangent.

Not OP, but yeah, that was the point. Humans are social, thus political, animals.

That just means there’s a political element to human interaction, not that everything is political. Astronomy is about the cosmos, not politics, but astronomers engage in politics like everyone else. There’s an entire world outside of humanity, and some people are not interested in turning that into more human bickering, which you can easily find in explicitly political and news discussions.

People being allowed to look at stars is a political issue. I’m a big astronomy fan and I’d like more money to go to astronomers to do more research. That’s political…

Pipes to flush your shit into aren’t there because it’s a good idea to have them. They’re there because somebody made a political decision to require them.

If only there wasn't a political party who though legislating who can use what bathroom. Now your shit is political too.

I haven’t heard that new catchphrase to date.

There’s an old joke about the Network OSI layer: What are layers 8 and 9? Political and Financial.

I think the context with things like that refer to internal business politics and having diplomatic conversations versus State or National Politics.

Avoid religion and politics in general seems like solid advice as it’s too emotionally charged for most people to discuss purely logically. (Also, there are too many x factors and most politicians are relatively short term (speaking of USA here).

Disagree, downvoted! /s

Aside from political discussion, I see that opinion (say os or console X is better than Y) also bring downvotes.

I find that asking questions and giving facts (not a wrong one) won't get downvoted and stay at 1 at worst.

More accurately, everything is ideological at its core. I say this as science.

Even tabs vs spaces is an ideological battle. And so is for and against downvoting. I am against downvoting because I am against censorship and for free speech.

And to then say "avoid ideology" or to be modding a platform based on a "no ideology" ideology is like being against meaningful conversation on a conversation platform.

So we are left with excessive pampering and everyone walking on eggshells. Whenever something gets ideological, we can't handle it and so we censor it. Or hide behind a downvote. All because we're not allowed, and hence have had no practice.

The platform that can handle political discourse without breaking will be the next great social media platform. We owe it to ourselves to build it, instead of pretending this is already it, whatever your platform of choice.

I have been downvoted in technological threads, just expressing my past experience on docker. Should we avoid those as well?

The ground you walk on is not political. If folks learn to take it easy, we'll be in better shape.

> Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone.

I upvote everyone on this bases. In reddit for example, If I sort by controversial more often than not it just someone with an equally dumb or smart but different opinion.

Discussing stuff in the Internet is difficult, and requieres a very good moderation, something that IMO HN does a good job, for what I've seen.

Reddit is the wild west of subs, there are good and bad mods, but once a sub becomes too popular it's just impossible to avoid vote brigading.

I've also been administrator for a number of forums, and it's basically volunteering job. If you're not paid or getting a profit from it it's very hard to justify the work and the headaches that require to moderate a community.

In fact that's the main reason I've closed or sold the communities I had. In the end, there's not a lot of people who is willing to have reasonable and educated discussions, and nobody can do it all the time, so IDK, hope someone else has the energy, I don't.

From the communities I had, there's only one left. It has not a lot of users, yet I need time and energy to learn programming while I keep going to my current job and juggle with my life, so I'll probably experiment with it to automate moderation in some way, hopelly not making it miserable for the users.

> Avoid political threads.

It's not the political threads that are a problem. There seems to be a few companies that you can't contradict in any way on the threads that repeat their mantra. It's usually not even the large ones, so it's very surprising when you get in a discussion that's quite visibly on a bad sideline, you point a technical flaw, and get downvoted into the minimum, just to have your comment go back up by the long tail of people upvoting unfairly greyed comments. (And you only discovers the "culture sponsor" if you go back and read the comments again.)

I imagine that's also unavoidable in a forum where a number of people that breath those mantras through the day frequent. I don't think there's any manipulation going on (except for workplace propaganda), but that does make technical thread political too, and it's probably very disorienting if it's a technical subject you care about.

Anyway, I don't think HN has any penalty for accumulating downvotes. So I don't think there's any improvement to make here.

> I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it.

Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means they're not experiencing any harm.

Nothing you can say can hurt me == I have an unhealthy habit of suppressing my negative emotions

Hey, wanted to respond to your comment because mine could come off as unhealthy.

I simply mean that I'm old enough, have experienced enough that there are very few people in the world that can say something which I haven't already been told or I haven't imagined myself. Some rando on the net can't possibly hurt.

But yeah, I don't mean to suggest suppressing your feelings.

Respectfully I don't really agree that this is a thing. There is an element of discerning that a person is just a jerk, misguided, dumb, or just shitposting without consequence due to anonymity or whatever and learning to disregard their opinions as irrelevant. That is, a lot of internet randos fall into this category.

But I also think if people don't trigger a warning as someone worth shunning that their criticism affects us, especially irl.

Experiencing a negative emotion is not always, or even most of the time, the same thing as being hurt.

I think that's going to fall into an argument of semantics.

Can you give an example?

I mean, I experience several negative emotions (frustration, anger, etc.) reading the average comment thread on the internet, but to say that I am “hurt” by them would be a grotesque exaggeration …

The scientific process leaves no room for emotions what so ever. Errors in the scientific process could have devastating results. If you can not separate your emotional well beings from the truth go and do something where your feelings are of no consequence.

If you can't separate "separating emotional well being from the truth" and "acknowledging you have emotions" you should go and take a vacation.

To an academic, they are never wrong, you just don’t understand. The more you try to argue will get swatted down as hateful.

My main issue with downvotes is they are almost always used incorrectly. Including here at HN. They are not meant to be an "agree/disagree" button, but rather a way to filter out content that is not relevant to the discussion at hand. Disagreeing does not mean it is irrelevant, especially if it is well written and in good faith. We should allow all viewpoints that are put forward with proper intentions.

Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if you agree with it or not.

They ARE meant to be a disagree button

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

I was not only referring to HN but the many communities that employ up/down voting. And for the record, I disagree with pg's take. Here is Reddit's official stance on downvoting:

>Think before you downvote and take a moment to ensure you're downvoting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for downvoting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your downvotes are given for good reasons.

https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...

I feel following this advice leads to better communities with more diverse and more useful conversation.

> My main issue with downvotes is they are almost always used incorrectly. Including here at HN. They are not meant to be an "agree/disagree" button, but rather a way to filter out content that is not relevant to the discussion at hand.

Says who? And why should anyone listen to them? There seems to be a lot of talk about how it's not being used as designed, but absolutely no one provides any evidence to support that there's "One True Way" to use voting buttons.

Sure, that may be technically correct and in practice people downvote for any reason they choose. Nothing can stop them. But if they were used to promote viewpoints and better discussion, the end result would be better communities.

As for the "says who?", for example, that is Reddit's official stance on voting, which I quoted elsewhere in this thread.

You've said it would lead to better discussion. I'm not convinced that's the case. I think flagged and grey comments being filtered out actually helps conversations more often than not. Can we empirically determine which will lead to better communities? Based on my experience than nearly every single community with lax moderation (official moderation and community moderation) turns into a cesspool. There's a reason you're here for conversation after all and not on 4chan.

In my experience flagged comments are typically off topic or abusive. I don't recall ever seeing a flagged comment that was an honest attempt at discussion. As for grayed comments that are an honest attempt at discussion? Very common. I upvote heavily downvoted comments that didn't deserve it almost daily here. I've also been the victim of massive downvoting merely because I present a viewpoint that the hive-mind doesn't like. If you're only interested in a single viewpoint and don't want to see all sides to a topic, then sure, this system is great. I like seeing more viewpoints and perspectives.

Maybe what's needed is explicit Agree and Disagree buttons, with indicators, to skim off such pollution of up/downvotes-as-QC?

That would be an interesting experiment. Make it a 2D axis... Agree <--> Disagree, and Low Quality <--> High Quality. Only allow voting on one of the options.

... left and right vote in addition to up and downvote?

Do not specify any rules nor instructions about when to vote left and when to vote right, but too much votes in either direction and the comment starts getting hidden.

If you disagree with the trend where any particular comment is going, figure out the horizontal direction you should click by yourself.

edit.

I think there is no need for up/downvotes after this system is implemented. Some secret amount of horizontal votes in either direction is good (counted as upvote). Too much over the limit and the extra is counted as a downvote. Hide the score from voters. Ban comments that attempt to discuss the score of any comment. Now everyone has a reason to be a bit more careful when voting (...except when a comment is obviously too left or right).

There are some opensource, reddit alternatives that might be willing to implement this. https://lemmy.ml/ comes to mind. You could suggest it there and it might fall upon open ears.

I would suggest you email that idea to dang. I'd like to see it tried here.

Hold on, HN has downvote buttons? I don't see them. Are they for mods?

HN's voting system is a bit complicated. They will remove the downvote button for various reasons. For example you can't downvote replies to your comments, only upvote. I think also if you are a newer user, you can't downvote.

You have to have >500 karma, iirc.

This is correct.

> If downvotes don't matter

Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it.

Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle.

Downvotes are of even less consquence.

Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.

> Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything.

I think this should be true to individuals, in regards to the ownership they feel over their online account and the content they create.

But I do not think this is (or should be) true in regards to an online community. Because I think sites like Hacker News and Ars Technica have relatively healthy comment ecosystems, where the content of the comments is valuable and contributes immensely to the store of knowledge these sites contain.

(Notably, Ars Technica has a more obvious, perceivable liberal political bias which I happen to agree with, so I'm sure the value of that community is divided, whereas I think Hacker News is more politically balanced.)

This is one of the more frustrating parts of the whole thing. I try not to care much about votes, but when a "throwaway comment" gets 50+ upvotes, while a carefully thought out, heavily researched, link/citation supported post with a lot of "meat" to it gets no votes at all, or even a downvote... that's just kind of grating in some sense. Well, it is to me anyway.

But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you? Again -- votes don't matter. I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain.

Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)

Again -- votes don't matter. I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain.

The parent post made an assertion, but did not really justify that assertion. Sure, it's easy to say that in some abstract sense "down votes don't matter". I believe that myself, in that sort of abstract / hand-wavy sense. But real life experience shows us that down votes do matter to people - at least some people, some times, in some situations. Why? I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not going to pretend to understand the deeper aspects of that. But it seems self evident to me that it's related to the other evolved responses we humans have, related to peer approval, social status, recognition, embarrassment, etc.

But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you?

In the specific case I mentioned, I think it's largely about the mismatch between expectations and perceived subjective sense of "right/wrong" and reality. I expect random throwaway comments that just say "taxation is theft" to get downvoted. But when I spend 30 minutes doing research, looking up citations, and crafting a carefully composed response to something, to try to make a point or provide a useful reference to help somebody and then that gets down voted, it triggers that instinctive "unfairness reaction" that we have. Or that's my approximate theory anyway.

Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes?

I think because a downvote is a form of disapproval, and it's done in public, and it correlates to our desire to avoid being shamed / embarrassed, especially in front of others.

I appreciate your response, even if my question was perhaps 50% rhetorical.

Of course I can understand the psychological part of it, but that's what I contest here.

You write an insightful message in a forum. Perhaps 5,000 people read it, 100 upvote it, 200 downvote it, and let's say that 5 reply with disagreement or trolling.

So in the end you find yourself frustrated with the 100 downvotes and the 5 trolls. It's irrational.

I can understand how people who profit from likes, upvotes and comments in forums and social media can care about their "Internet points". But for an individual person to care if their post has any kind of vote or to track the number of likes, sorry, I don't think that rationalizing it is any beneficial, productive, sensical.

I agree that it's irrational for the most part. But even understanding that on a cerebral level still doesn't stop it from being slightly annoying / frustrating / whatever at times. The vagaries of human nature, I guess...

Downvotes matter because they often tie into visibility. On HN, a few downvotes make the post fade out so it is difficult to read. On Reddit, two downvotes collapse a post so that its text becomes hidden.

This means on these platforms downvotes are a weaponised tool wielded by someone who can destroy the effort that went into post with but a mouse click.

Then such forums where your posts can be manipulated so easily are a lost cause, and there's no point in getting frustrated about them.

I whole heartedly disagree.

Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down votes the first few comments would have an even bigger advantage than they do now.

[1] just like this comment I am leaving, which probably would have been better with just a down vote.

Downvoting to disagree is my knee-jerk reaction, too. But in most cases it's not as helpful as leaving a comment.

Any time I leave a comment, there is usually at least some thought and effort behind it, and a downvote without explanation doesn't teach me anything, or persuade me to change my mind.

If I don't know the reason for the downvote, my frequent assumption is "this person has poor reading comprehension, or isn't very bright, and just didn't understand what I'm saying. People often dislike things they don't understand. I guess it's true what they say: judge a man by the people who disagree with him."

That's completely unfounded, sure, but lacking any additional information, it's as valid as any other conclusion about why I got downvoted. Maybe I've made some obvious error, but how would I know? In general, getting downvoted tends to make me less respectful of other people on HN, and more confident in my own (flawed) reasoning, compared to getting a thoughtful disagreement.

> it scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power

How do we get from "I am being downvoted" to "malicious and petty people"? That looks like an issue. You said you have no problem being wrong, twice, but immediately assume anyone who downvotes your comment is malicious, when it could be a signal that your comment is just not hitting the right notes.

> But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it)

/snip

> It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.

I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact, it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of exposure.

I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture. This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters. Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general, downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and not worth complaining or even thinking much about.

Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but".

[1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with them

It's especially bad on a site like HN - an account only gets a downvote capability if they've received what is it, 400 upvotes? - so you're assured that every downvote you receive is someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote (or are a serial link poster getting link karma upvotes).

There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.

I’ve been using HN for a few years now, mostly lurking but commenting every now and then, and I’m creeping up to the downvote privilege threshold. (I think it’s 500, not 400.) I wouldn’t describe myself as “someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote,” I think it’s more “someone who says little things over many years and some people have upvoted them here and there.” In other words, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that your description of HN matches everyone’s experience, and not everyone with downvote ability is the same type of person.

HN has a certain discussion parameters and moderation system on purpose. The goal on HN isn’t to allow open ended discussions on all topics. I for one appreciate that we can talk computers and technology here and that the moderators keep the average level of the discussion high. If I want politics and other garbage I’ll go somewhere else. I have never experienced any issues here. Been here a looong time. Don’t be edgy and contribute positively to discussions with curiosity and you will do fine.

There are many threads here about the politics of technology (big tech, open source vs closed source software, cryptocurrency and finance, the fabrication industry and China, etc) and there are also plenty of threads about politics unrelated or tangentially related to computers (off the top of my head, housing and homelessness, the schooling system, and climate change get discussed here not infrequently). HN isn't for just computers and technology, but rather for anything that sparks curiosity.

With that being said, the moderation here is very excellent and generally keeps the quality of discussion somewhat high, so I agree with your central thesis.

I agree. I guess it’s just not dogmatic. Moderators and HNers are very strict about being constructive on more political topics.

Just for the record, the reply to this comment by bopbeepboop that was downvoted to "dead" status is a good example of the type of downvoting I disagree with.

I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I have no control over the behavior of others on this site. I'm just putting that out there.

About bopbeepboop: The comment was not flagged, the account is banned. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26735029 near the end of the tread, the post by dang

A good trick is to go to the comment history, and search until you find the last streak of not dead comments. It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine), and enough vouch unkill the comment. In the case of bopbeepboop it looks like many of the comments were vouched.

OK, I guess I was working under the assumption that the comment was dead because it was downvoted enough times. My bad.

> It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine)

How does one do that? Haven't seen any option to do that.

Click on the time/age of the comment (currently "3 hours ago") and you will get a direct link to the comment with more options, like "vouch" and "flag".

That’s the story.

In actuality, even factual and cited posts will get you shadowbanned if your opinion is contrary to the mainstream (on HN) narrative.

I think it’s more “conforming” than “constructive”.

I was thinking that the downvote brigade (to use a reddit term) is actually promulgating a type of ideological conformity litmus test on HN users.

If you post/comment in a certain manner you get upvoted and break into the potential downvoters. Otherwise, you stay in purgatory of the middlings.

On HN in particular, I don't know how downvotes could be made any less psychologically impactful, short of completely hiding comment scores on even your own posts. Comments you posted never change color while you're logged in, so all you ever see is a little number, and the minimum score of -4 prevents massive pile-on situations.

I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.

> But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them

You don't understand. The dim messages are a nerd badge of honor here! Some of my proudest HN messages are those that finished at -4.

I like the spirit :)

> I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological,

As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted.

Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions.

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias.

Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.

> But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological

I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained me at doing. Comment and walk away.

By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most any forum, including Reddit.

Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting pattern, that process might be discouraging.

My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here. That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try.

Maybe you can't respond to this, but I'd like to know if that's not less satisfying. I don't get much pleasure from just having my day ("shouting into the void") what I'm really here for is engagement, and the high-quality responses I get (or sometimes just acknowledgement). Without feedback there's nothing in it for me.

" It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try. "

I agree to that.

But do not agree to just leave comment and leave approach in general. Then it is not a discussion anymore. You will never experience if there are any counterpoints to your opinion/facts, if you do not read replies to your opinions/facts. But if you experienced you get too emotional ... so aybe better this approach, than the furiated insulting one I guess.

It's a good feedback system. Just because I and you don't get it, doesn't mean someone was indifferent to the post. It's meant to filter out discussions that are uninteresting. Just got to deal with if one isn't that interesting. Adding posts on top of that would be counterproductive.

I often raise somewhat controversial opinion and topics. Very rarely do I see clusters of downvotes, and I'm not surprised people are against my own ideas. Otherwise they would be common! It also mirrors society outside academia. It happens that later upvotes changes the score significantly. Such is it with all change.

Without some skin in the game, it's all spam and trolling otherwise. What might look strange in a mod system, might under analysis turn out to be well designed.

For all forums there is an adaption phase, before getting what people expect from posts.

There are a few interesting "alternatives" to the standard downvotes we see. For example:

* "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g., "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on e.g., Lobsters.

* Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3 downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or some random forum...

I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that though.

Personally I think you're taking things too seriously, even though you're right. I enjoyed "The Great Online Game"[1] recently (1 comment), which stages this engagement as play. Although I would like to see my karma go up faster, that's not the point of the play for me. Unfortunately a lot of ludicrous, non-contributing, downvoting schmoes are part of the game. It's ok, it's still- for me- for fun, and I don't feel the need to adjust myself or my strategy of play because of the directed, biased negativity about.

To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems: Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online, understand each other, and build our own defensive & observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, & growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece of understanding this web ought be able to encompass.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488

> I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got

It doesn't even need to be 4 accounts. Just a single lazy downvote can be infuriating due to the asymmetry in effort and influence.

The root cause is downvotes having been made into a combination of multiple things; yes it is a shortcut for expressing disagreement, but it is also a metric used for decreasing the salience of a point (e.g. in HN). Imagine how much of history of science, religion, philosophy would be lost if disagreeability of a point alone was a good heuristic for its attention-worthiness.

Additionally, since downvotes are an expression of disagreement, they are just opinions that have privileged representations in the UI, but they can't be disagreed with like other opinions. It does not build dialectic, it kills it by not allowing responses.

Ultimately we are trying to dynamically build a model of at least attention and content value based on collective intelligence that can articulate on 2 dimensions.

My humble proposal would be double the size of dimensions; have up-down votes for dis-agreement, which require justification, which can be responded to, and back-fore votes for salience dynamics, i.e. foreground if "I think more people should read this" and background if "I think people shouldn't waste time on this idea".

This really is an interesting problem, and I'm not sure if there's an answer. Sometimes I think the whole idea of HN/Reddit type sites is just doomed to ultimate failure. Dunbar's number is every bit as real in a digital space as it is in a physical space.

I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. So instead of a global channel, your primary feed would come from your pod of 150ish that you would interact with more directly. This would mirror the concept of a village. Then maybe there would be another tier, the "region" if you will, where a single top post of the day from each village would get posted, then maybe a larger "nation" type area where the top post from each region over a week would get posted weekly.

This system would let people spend most of their time with like-minded people, which is exactly what people want as exhibited by downvote behavior, but still allow for a degree of cross pollination of thought.

Zoomed out, it seems like there really are two types of social media networks. The first is the hyper niche one where the entire conversation revovles around the topic and nothing but the topic. But once you leave your niche and become a more general site, cultural and idelogical alignment becomes a much bigger driver than topic and interest alignment.

Completely agree and basically proposed the same system last month here[0]. I also made a comment matching yours about topic based communities[1].

An analogy I'm beginning to understand for this problem is Depth-First-Search Vs Breadth-First-Search. Right now most communities are BFS, where the entire community can only make one step at a time.

With the current system of BFS, you can only meaningfully affect public opinion by making arguments in the Overton Window of the community that you are in. If it is beyond the Overton Window, even if it's ultimately correct like Galileo, it will be down-voted and thus not seen.

Small communities on the other hand can bubble together in a DFS space. They can go way beyond the current understanding and hopefully reach results that they can bring back to the non-geeks of that subject, once they reach some meaningful and testable conclusions.

So we need both BFS and DFS. With HN we get a more focused BFS, but it's still BFS. With Twitter we get an unfocused DFS that dives head-first into other opposing DFS communities. There's a balance we need to strike but the nuance is going to be tough.

I made another comment[2] that Google is accidentally building these 150 person Dunbar communities with their Google FLoC project. It would be really exciting if that were to be open-sourced and allowed to be built into a social media site.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678129

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27495183

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27932625

> I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities.

joinmastodon.org may interest you

Isn't that Reddit? I'm not sure you can cut a "village" over the internet population in any way that doesn't breed harmful behavior. Reddit is on the most harmless end of those possibilities, but it causes problems there too.

Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your comment?

My guess is it was downvoted for calling out that what people really want is to be in a bubble of likeminded culturally similar people. I don't see a problem with this behavior, it just looks like basic human nature to me. But I think some people are offended that they might not be as "enlightned" as they fancy themselves to be.

Given that many of his public posts are devoted to ranting against conformity of thought, it's amusing that pg designed a forum that rewards exactly that behavior.

I don't think I agree at all.

Some of my favorite comments I've made here are the ones that get downvoted. They point me to places where one of several interesting scenarios has occurred, such as, but not limited to:

1) I'm right, other people have not yet realized it and the way I'm expressing it doesn't make it clear that there's a good argument there. This is a fantastic opportunity.

2) I'm wrong about something, and haven't yet realized how. This is extremely valuable information because my own cognitive biases mean that it's difficult for me to discover through introspection.

3) lots of other possibilities too!

When I stumble upon making a comment that gets unexpected downvotes, I have come across some of the most valuable information HN can give me.

If I make a comment that I know will get lots of downvotes, I'm just wasting everybody's time. If I share something interesting that I think will get lots of upvotes, I may give some good information to others, but otherwise I'm mostly validating myself, which isn't a great use of my time.

But most of the time I'm not commenting with any thoughts to votes, it's just about discussion. The votes just serves as a standin for body language that we'd get if we were talking face to face.

I don't think downvotes are the problem.

I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms. The people who would normally upvote your honest good faith against the grain take are no longer on the platform, because the reigning ideology pushed them out. That doesn't mean you are necessarily ideologically aligned with these people, reality is much more nuanced then black and white.

> I don't think downvotes are the problem. > I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms

Echo-chamberization is a result of downvoting. When comments close to the borders of Overton window are downvotes, Overtone windows narrows over time.

As an academic experiment, one could post a message here on HN and on Usenet to see how the interaction plays out on each platform. On Usenet, people can not vote or moderate your message. Messages are only removed from Usenet relays if they violate law for the most part. Anyone can reply if interested in doing so, with any text or content. Has anyone done this experiment recently?

On Usenet, you can moderate your own incoming messages. Assuming you have a suitable newsreader (I know of none that are not suitable for use with killfiles).

Opt-In self moderation is great. You can even do that here on HN with add-ons like uBlock.

From My Filters

  ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)
  ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr
  ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr+tr

More examples [0] and there are a few other incantations of this.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22781635

Filters would be fantastic. I would love very much to be able to filter out specific words and phrases from my HN view.

A simpler add-on for words and phrases is FoxReplace. [1]

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/

@crazy_horse, what do you have in mind when you say "we can do much better than downvotes"?

In my opinion, stackoverflow-style downvotes are a good solution. Downvotes cost reputation points to cast, and can only be cast once you are at a certain trust level. SO has other issues, but I think they got downvoting right.

I use a throwaway account and a really simple tamper monkey script that hides my current feedback score, this allows me to interact on this website without getting neurotically obsessed with how other people think of me.

It allows me to push back on polarizing posts without having to get too psychologically involved.

I partly disagree with your comment (HN isn't an academy) but you make a good point that 4 downvotes are enough to effectively make a comment disappear. That can be abused to easily wreck good comments, adn genuinely shitty comments don't get enough negative feedback.

When you add in flagging and other factors, the 'mysterious black box + benevolent moderator' approach satisfies nobody and is easily gamed by bad actors. It's just an attempt at community security through obscurity, and like all STO approaches it doesn't work. There's also evidence to suggest that flamewars do a better job of eliminating toxicity over the long term than the approach outlined above.

Votes determine visibility. A post doesn't matter if it's not visible.

A bad vote is more harmful than a bad comment. Bad comments get sorted. A bad vote makes the front page worse.

Making votes visible makes the bad actors visible. Though I think other feedback mechanisms are better.

I think downvotes should require a comment as well. It's too limbic without that.

I don't. If there was a comment I'd be tempted to argue. I'd prefer if I couldn't see the karma of my own posts & account too.

Feature request if mods are reading: checkbox to hide my karma from me.

I can see this.

One half-cocked idea I can think of is downvotes require a comment explaining why. Conversationally, "I agree" or "that's correct" requires no follow on conversation. However, "I disagree" or "that's wrong" requires some sort of counter-argument or reason why you disagree. IMO, it does some good in making people explain their position, at least copy/paste another position, or shitpost and then they can deal with their own downvotes.

HN has a bit of the opposite policy, but it would be interesting to only allow downvotes if you have responded to the comment.

You would need a separate mechanism for flagging though to filter low effort contributions and it is questionable if that wouldn't just replace downvotes with flagging. Alternatively maybe only have that rule for comments above a certain length, although that isn't a good metric either.

> someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got

I think the Reddit server software actually detects that kind of thing now and will make those votes not count.

Likewise I think they’ve also made it so that a single comment alone that downvotes get piled onto will not hurt the account of the person that wrote it that much any longer.

For stories? Yes. For comments? They don't seem to care. Also the reddit bot mob is a very real thing and there's folks who enjoy evading those sorts of attempts at control. It becomes a game unto itself.

> I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them

I agree with everything you wrote except for the part about actually not participating - try as I might (and knowing better), I just can't keep myself away. I've taken long hiatuses, but I'm always inexorably drawn back anyway.

Exactly. The article reads like expressing displeasure is hampered. But if negative comments have increased, then that is a good thing, because at least the commenters have had to come out of the woodwork to express themselves.

And then we can talk, if they actually have a point. Or we can upvote your point.

Downvotes are anonymous slaps on the wrist with no recourse. They're insulting, offensive, and then further used for censorship (especially here). People who don't know what they're talking about, can't articulate themselves, or are just taking sides all get to punish what they don't like without being caught. They get to be taken seriously. By robots.

The author of the article is a prolific writer. If anyone knows the importance of writing, even long-form writing, it would be him, and it's exactly what he used to make his point about downvotes. He could not have done it with a downvote, or even a tweet.

Nuance is invaluable and context is king. Language gives us all of it. Twitter makes us stupid. Votes make us children.

When expression is limited, the dumber - and more violent - we become.

I wonder how much downvotes are to blame for the incredible political bias over on Reddit (just check out /r/politics). Or whether it would naturally occur without the downvotes anyway. I suspect downvotes exacerbate the problem but probably aren't the only cause.

r/politics is a huge echo chamber. Occasionally you will see posts with thoughtful disagreement, but usually it’s extremely one sided with the top 100 comments all confirming each other.

The problem with "democratic" downvotes is that the vote of an expert is equal with the vote of an ignorant who votes while browsing the internets in the evening while drunk.

Actually, that's kind of the problem with democracy in general.

> I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power.

That's a fine opinion to have, but why are you then in academia?

There's definitely a downvote squad. I've noticed my comments tend to do much better their first few hours and downvotes tend to come later after the submission has fallen off the front page.

A while back I posted that according to my local state utility, installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price of installed nat-gas per year, both for the newest installations. And from that I concluded nuclear power was the only viable alternative to CO2 producing energy.

Now this is the highest heresy in our new world religion, yet I only lost a single vote. Granted I didn't get any useful feedback on why I was wrong, likely because that would have involved 2 minutes of googling and some basic math, and it's just easier to believe what you want and click downvote. But Hacker News is still way better than anyplace else for serious discussions.

> installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price of installed nat-gas per year

I don't know which state you are in, but for the US as a whole "recent [2018] wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-no...

But that's my point, none of these studies ever cite a utility's actual costs. When I got curious and looked at what the actual cost to the utility (not counting any federal rebates) just their actual outlays, versus how much power was generated over the year, it was ridiculous.

And the easy way to know this is true is that utilities are still building nat-gas plants. It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits. If wind was actually cheaper than fuel, they'd just be over building wind farms so that no new nat-gas plants were needed.

> just their actual outlays

My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel, or maybe the two types of plants have different financing models that are hard to compare directly, but I wouldn't be qualified to check your results even if you presented all the data.

> It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits.

Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.

> My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel

The docs seemed pretty clear that they were the operating costs of the installation. I had to find the install cost and the operating costs separately.

> Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.

That's a good point, but there is also an enormous amount of pressure to go carbon free and these power companies answer to several regulatory bodies all with enormous power of their operations. It's not unreasonable to believe there are requirements to move to wind for continued licensing.

Downvoting here on HN does seem pretty arbitrary. (Either that, or I just don't post quality comments/posts :D)

I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I don't know how successful they are.

I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might have some viability.

As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.

Would it be better if you get down voted to hell and also get swamped with throwaway comments like "that's stupid"

I think throwaway accounts should be banned, or at the very least, there should be a waiting period before you can comment. If you participate with thoughtful comments, you’ll reach 500 within a month. What bothers me is people creating these accounts on a whim just a throw out some garbage, or maybe a valid opinion, and then disappear in the night. If you had to wait a week to post it might lead to massive duplicate account creation, but I think it’s worth considering.

> or at the very least, there should be a waiting period before you can comment.

That wouldn't work that well for sites like this one where reading doesn't require an account. The moment one wants to create an account will most probably be the moment one wants to reply to a post or comment with a salient point; making it impossible to reply unless the account was created with forethought would just lead to the account never being created in the first place ("I would create an account to reply to this, but even if I create an account I cannot reply, so why bother?").

I believe Hell has nine levels; HN downvoteland has only 4.

I upvoted you for this.

Shh!

You realise downvotes are a big deal for managing information on certain sites that we frequent...

> If downvotes don't matter…

They clearly do, to you. I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego, but if I were to downvote this it would be because you don't have a persuasive argument for why an upvotes-only feedback system (which can also be easily gamed) is any better than one which supports both.

> I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego,

This is criticism, IMO it's stupid criticism that should deserve a downvote, but you still wasted time to write it and it's ok, according to OP view of things, you responded to his words with some ad hominem attack, it's pointless and dumb in my opinion, but you put in the effort to respond and presented your arguments.

Compare it to the blind downvoting, you get downvoted, with no reasoning, not knowing who did it and if you get 4 of them your comment gets hidden.

Just 4.

I much prefer your ad hominems to hypotetical perfectly valid downvotes.

At least now people can form an opinion on what you wrote.

With downvotes people just assume that the comment was worthless or worse.

What if you had to reply to the comment before being able to downvote it?

It would at least be a bit less anonymous.

The world is binary, there are just a lot more binary decisions than we often tote around. It’s a great model for academic and scientific work but not for society.

Thank the powers that be who push statistical analysis as being the “one path” to truth.

The mathematicians who first defined our statistical tools warned about using them to run society, as they are all designed with a certain amount of loss of precision.

When it comes to running a society, applying statistical models to people means rounding people off to make a choice work. Human biology works on adapting agency to the most common inputs; currently we are fine with man made behavior of treating each other like rounding errors.

This meme we can just statistically carve up wealth held by a minority is a huge joke of a cultural effort; as you can see here you are berating the efforts of one of the minority we protect as being pathological.

For starters, what real obligation is there scientifically to believe that Zuckerberg is that wealthy?

Oh that’s right; their experts who built their systems that train our biology to stay addicted to them, using scientific theory of biology to manufacture consent.

downvotes matter a lot and you should not ignore them. they are trying to tell you something. you dont have to agree with that message, as I frequently post things on HN that get downvoted, usually not that surprisingly, and I continue to simply disagree with the majority HN community on certain topics. downvotes are usually accompanied by a few real responses that will add context to why these downvotes might be coming in.

If we're going to have "upvotes" that can amplify things to a ridiculous degree, like all the vaccine mis-information on facebook that's being spread by something like eight individuals to hundreds of millions of people, then we need downvotes too. it's of course bad for facebook's business model.

If you want to tell me something you need to spell it out, not leave me guessing and wondering whether I have said something untrue or that you merely dislike it.

This pretty much sums up my sentiment as well. I think people should comment their disagreement instead of downvote. Others can then upvote the response, but at least dialogue can remain open.

I've actually considered using a screenname like commentdontdownvote lol.

I don't mind downvotes on my comments, I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind of reason for it. Even a short comment "I don't like this" would be telling because it would indicate they don't have a reason other than emotion. Often I initially get a bunch of downvotes and then later enough upvotes to even it out.

I downvote stuff because it's either low-effort or inflammatory. I don't know if it would be valuable to tell the commenter this, because they're unlikely to agree.

(I know that this isn't what everyone does, just wanted to offer a data point.)

>I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind of reason for it.

Could be interesting if it were applied selectively. If a user had a higher number of downvotes to upvotes over a sustained period of time for instance.

Someone with honest contrarian views would not be hurt by this because they leave usually comments with reasons. I appreciate them as much as the up voters.

Agree completely.

While in theory I completely agree downvotes should be around, in practice I have seen they are an ideological voting machine used to suppress opinions.

It is kind of unusual how fast the downvotes appear, as if there are downvote bots running on the HN & Reddit. I've posted a comment and had what appeared to be 3 downvotes within a minute.

Of course, I am an evidence driven technologist that is not very partisan so that could explain some of it.

I always find the assumption that quick reactions are "bots" a bit weird. If I click on an active discussion, some comments will be "0 minutes" old (like yours right now, although it won't be when I submit this comment, because typing takes time - but downvoting doesn't). If I click on "comments" tab on HN, all comments there are new. So it's not particularly surprising that many people see your comment very shortly after it is posted on an active site like HN and react to it immediately.

They're not bots. Bots act on logic, however simple it is. These are mostly people who disengaged their brain.

How do you figure that? Plenty cases where "would I downvote that" is not something you need to think a lot about, so "quick" != "disengaged brain".

Long history participating in and analyzing discussions on Reddit.

If a comment that requires at least some thinking does not have a simple TLDR, preferably as the first line, you're going to get downvotes on Reddit and Imgur.

People just aren't there to think and they have this "weapon" that they can use to shoo away anything they don't immediately understand.

It's even more ridiculous that simple one sentence or better yet, one meme comments get drives of upvotes.

You can easily automate that. Just copy and paste comments in the same thread, mix with some meme comments, and you're halfway to an account with high karma.

Begs the question, why bother participating in this bottom of the barrel mindwankery? Nothing but an addiction these days.

I say Reddit, but that platform is really a lot of smaller forums with useful information, even if you have to wade through some shit.

Imgur on the other hand, I finally couldn't stand the sheer idiocy and quit. It's amazing, and I wish I could quit this site and Reddit, too.

Down votes create cultural echo chambers and social cooling.

What down votes should be for is rudeness or site violations...but they're effectively used to blackball people with counter opinions.

There's a social cooling that goes along with anyone who has a counter opinion to the tribes narrative but doesn't want to be digitally outcast.

And eventually those with differing opinions who do speak up accumulate enough down votes and are outcast.

And over time the echo chamber continues to grow....

Edit: god bless HN echo chamber and the down votes.

I suspect the original author would agree with your assessment on effects, but doesn't see either cultural echo chambers or social cooling as de-facto negatives. Lacking a downvote signal (i.e. a "most people who saw this disagreed" signal), a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers of equal apparent strength or value, increasingly divided by who upvotes what with no downvote counter-signal to breed some kind of consensus.

I don't think it's assumable that either the inability to converge in a shared space or the alternative to social cooling (shout louder to be bigger, because there's no way to signal the other ideas should be smaller) are a net positive for the global online community (the latter, of course, does drive those engagement numbers up though...).

> a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers

So you mean a variety of opinions?

A variety of strongly-held opinions that are not proved against each other and don't intersect to build a coherent narrative.

I would much rather have a variety of perspectives than a coherent narrative.

You learn more that way.

My observations don't suggest that principle holds true for the general poplulation. I fear too many people lack either sufficient knowledge or sufficient critical thinking to independently determine whether strongly-made claims successfully fact-check.

Lacking that ability, consensus of the commons is more likely to be correct than fringe opinion and can back-stop that missing ability.

Much of the Internet-connected world is currently running a fascinating experiment on itself regarding whether a public exposed to a fire-hose of unmodulated opinion can grow in aggregate wisdom or will be dissolved by gibbering foolishness. The results of this experiment are not yet determined.

You make interesting points.

My observations suggest that human beings above 18 are adults and can think for themselves.

"Benevolent" attempts at manipulating the crowds by people who think they are wiser or more knowledgeable...leads to more harm than good.

If by manipulation you mean discourse, then there's a whole history of more knowledgeable people sharing their knowledge to manipulate crowds to great benefit. Thomas Payne. Thomas Jefferson. Martin Luther King Jr.

If you instead mean regulation of what information enters a consensus... That's basically every history book. Every encyclopedia. The curated speaker list at a convention. The moderated comment stream on Hacker News.

And yes, such regulation can be used for ill also. The fascists in World War II used direct control of broadcast media to shape the thinking of the population. Of course, so did Roosevelt with his fireside chats.

I don't know what the future of information exchange in social media looks like. But I'm getting a strong sense that it doesn't look like Facebook and Twitter. I don't think those systems provide the right tools to build consensus.. instead, they seem to build cacophony. They reward enragement (because it drives engagement) and make it difficult for people unfamiliar with the topic to distinguish mainstream opinion from fringe.

Every forum, every social media site, every community participation vehicle rewards one thing above all: time.

Do I have time to make 4 or 5 burner accounts to enforce my votes? No. I have things to do.

Do I have time to post ad nauseum about any given topic to make my point? No. I have things to do.

And I'm sure you have things to do as well, so do a lot of people. But those that don't, have the thing we lack: time. And there's often reasons they have all that time. Often good reasons. And it's not because they're pleasant people.

I've been thinking how to counter this effect. How to give power to the silent majority.

I've been slowly writing a version of Reddit with an added level of moderation via direct democracy but made efficient by using proxy votes and statistical sampling. People with time and interest provide most is the content but moderation incentivizes behavior beneficial to the majority.

It's a fools errand as it's a double-sided market but I feel the need.

It probably is.

Moderation itself is an attempt at a solution. And it is a solution on a small enough scale. But when you're literally dealing with moderating the entire world 24/7, there just aren't the resources to deal with that.

You're attempting to automate that or kick that can back to the users. But just like here, just like reddit, just like StackOverflow, just like every single site that relies on community moderation that gets big, time beats all.

It'll be fine for a while and you'll think you've solved the issue, but then you'll tip and become larger than you can socially manage. And those with the most time will skew your samples and votes.

I've always had this idea that reputation systems and enforced, systematic gatekeeping might be a way to build stronger communities.

The fundamental issue of any fully open community is scale. From what I've seen, no online community really resists the swarm that comes when it goes viral. Whatever community that was there before, for all it's values and culture, gets replaced by the masses by sheer virtue of numbers.

Reputation systems can be gamed. On massive sites, they reward those with the most time.

Gatekeeping (or moderation) works, but like we've both already said, it only works for smaller scales.

Has weighting members by arrival order been tried? For example, the 100th member has 10x the voting power as the 1000th and so on.

A comment disputing the post with its own upvotes seems a better representation.

So original post states x (it can gather up votes that mean relevance). Then responses are posted, positive, negative, adding nuance - doesnt matter.. then those responses get up votes.

Seems to me that everything can be done with positive re-inforcement.

I would like to be able to filter out out votes though, maybe within a scope. So if you post x, someone disputes it with a comment that i disagree with that gets lots of upvotes.. i would like to be able to flag all those users as incompetent within that domain (this would just be my opinion and no one else would see it) then i can have two upvote scores: the masses, and the "competent in my eyes" masses.

I know this isnt a full solution.. just putting ideas out there

It sounds like this is more about your ego. Not to be glib, but if you have written out a thoughtful statement, who cares if it gets downvoted? You can’t control how other people are going to react, and getting upset that you lack that control, takes away from your arguments and makes it about you.

How do you respond when colleagues or students disagree? Perhaps working in academia so long has given you a false sense of superiority.

A downvote is not "disagreeing". It doesn't require the downvoter to be able to justify their action, they can just do it, and it is closer to violence than to communication.

Come and see the violence inherent to the system!

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