Ask HN: Why/when do you downvote?

When I "know" a comment is factually wrong, especially when the tone is of great confidence and putting down or rebuking people who aren't.

When a comment is hostile in a way that discourages discussion, or there is a long argument chain consisting of low-content/ad hominem/childish back-and-forth.

When jokes are not funny. I upvote when they make me laugh, but HN is known to be humorless because of the downvoting of anyone making "unserious" comments.

When someone is repeating or spreading what seems to me to be propaganda or political talking points, especially when those haven't already been brought up previously and don't have special relevance to the discussion.

Downvoting can serve as a weak signal of popular consensus (weak because the comment ranking algorithm seems to take author's total karma, time since posting, and relative age of the comment into account as well).

They help me as an author of comments to recognize when I have been too harsh, impolite, uncharitable, poorly worded, etc, but it's not always clear why some comments get downvoted. Sometimes there seems to be brigading or botting, but I obviously don't have the ability to know or definitively say whether it actually happens or not.

As a user I don't feel downvoting benefits me much other than providing an invisible outlet for expressing dissatisfaction, especially when I wouldn't be able publicly express it in a polite manner. I find it very annoying to see greyed-out comments and having to highlight them to read, and I hate the sorting of comments by score rather than date.

Great observations regarding personal/back-and-forth, I skip those too as a reader yet get caught up in it sometimes when I post a top-level thing.

> weak signal of popular consensus

Basically what I've been using it for recently

> but it's not always clear why some comments get downvoted

Yeah this is what mainly prompted the question - there's a stylistic component. Yet sometimes people just post funny comments that are out-of-character for HN but funny and it will be upvoted, I am often confused by it too.

The greyed-out comments thing I think is hilarious, it seems like an idea that comes up in a product meeting to take up whiteboard space or to lightly joke about implementing.

Spam I both downvote and flag.

Shills I downvote, and flag if they're blatant.

Zealots (people who are here to spread propaganda, rather than have a conversation) I often downvote. They may have a point (the first time they post), but they Just. Won't. Stop. They won't listen, either, or respond in good faith to peoples' arguments.

Bad faith replies I downvote, and flag if it's blatant.

And when I think about that list, it sounds a lot like the HN guidelines. I wasn't deliberately modeling my voting on the guidelines, but I think there's a basis in the guidelines for my approach.

I always assumed shills were like paid posts (HN's monetization). Unless you mean like non-startup related shills?

Agree, overall HN is pretty solid. There's basically no bullshit, yet at first glance you can't really tell it's moderated. They do a very good job of keeping distance yet staying on top of it when needed - and the community is great at flagging, though maybe sometimes slightly flag-happy! But it keeps a curated feed, I'm overall satisfied.

>Why/when do you downvote?

I dont have the ability to downvote. I'm not sure I would if I did, who cares about imaginary points.

I wish I could at least edit my posts and improve upon my grammar and spelling or make my posts clearer. Though it does seem my comments get deleted sometimes.

I'm autistic, so I'm overly blunt or whatever and I tend to draw hate.

>I find places with moderators and/or downvote schemes (HN, Reddit, Discord) extremely difficult to understand and survive long-term.

Oh yes, you'll find there's significant brigading on HN worse then Reddit. You'll be + score for hours and then all of a sudden -10 in under a minute. You'll find people will go to your previous posts and downvote everything they can. Your karma score will drop suddenly.

I'm -4 on this post for example? Hardly worth downvoting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40075630

Though yes, I seemed to have hit a bees nest on my TSMC comments and so people are downvoting everything of mine.

> It's in some ways worse than other forms of embarrassment because it's your very intelligence and ideas etched in stone as "bad take" forever to the public.

We have a problem online that is probably best described by echo chambers but it's a bit wider then that subject.

People are accustomed to never hearing any viewpoint but their own. Confirmation bias 100%, blocked! filtered! So when they see a comment that doesnt fully align with them... they don't stop at downvoting that one comment, they have to downvote all your recent comments.

>Does HN benefit from downvotes in a way that flagging does not and cannot address? If you don't downvote, answer why you upvote - I'm really curious about the reward system here, what it means and is all about. Why people like and dislike certain kinds of content here.

I also never upvote. Not sure how you do that, I assume I'm restricted from doing so? I was told long while back that since I get downvoted so much on so many of my comments that I'm tagged and soft shadow banned because of my low quality content.

> I'm -4 on this post for example?

I think people are interpreting the "Postgres is the best answer here" part of your post as "if you're not answering 'postgres' then your answer is bad" rather than how I expect you literally meant it (as in "I personally mostly use postgres, and the question is asking what I use, so the best answer for me to give is 'postgres'")

I appreciate the honesty of this post - I feel almost exactly the same way about most things you said. Social media seems over-engineered, and it's interesting that even behind the simple look of this UI there are layers of complexity, bells, & whistles we probably don't even know exist, like your missing upvote button.

> they don't stop at downvoting that one comment, they have to downvote all your recent comments

This has happened to me on every major platform. YouTube as well - post a comment someone doesn't like and they downvote all your videos lol. I just think of it as engagement since it isn't public there, but it's still interesting how much power random non-experts can have over the visibility and integrity of online information - especially if they're say a Reddit or Discord moderator. They effectively control what the general public sees and perceives as correct.

>This has happened to me on every major platform. YouTube as well - post a comment someone doesn't like and they downvote all your videos lol.

Oh for sure, I've had this happen on reddit many times as well. This is obviously one of Facebook's clear advantages and also why Youtube stopped showing the downvotes.

> but it's still interesting how much power random non-experts can have over the visibility and integrity of online information - especially if they're say a Reddit or Discord moderator. They effectively control what the general public sees and perceives as correct.

This is the real reason why Reddit, HN, and others are doing this. They intentionally want to be able to curate content. They WANT the echo chambers.

Usually because they violate two axioms of writing I believe in.

Paraphrasing…

A writer should apologize for writing a long missive when they should have taken the time to write a shorter one.

With writing, the ultimate sophistication is simplicity that is nothing else can be edited away without changing the original meaning.

What's the second axiom?

The first says the message should be simple and short. The second axiom says the explanation should be long and not only full of details that delight our sight sound and touch, but convey a sense of wonder by offering a fresh perspective and eschewing tired literary tropes.

In the opening of Dickens The Bleak House, “London” is the one word message. For a Dickens reader, you can infer London means Victorian Society. The rest of the paragraph is a delightful description of London. “Megalosaurus”, “The death of the sun”, and the reader’s realization that Dickens may be diagnosing what ails Victorian society and caked it with mud is the obsession with money or lack of it.

> London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

In your view does Dickens satisfy both? That is if you removed or changed a single word in that lovely description would it change its meaning? Is there a case where a sentence is of a minimum length out of necessity (to achieve a certain flow, level of description, etc.?)

Think I share your opinion - succinct is great but so is flowery if it's utilized.

Yes, Dickens satisfies both. He gets his message across simply. When he wants to expounds on what he means, he does it a beautiful and memorable way.

Upvoting and downvoting are a form of group communication, and I use them both with that intent. Just like you structure an individual post to have coordination and logical flow, a community structures a thread using voting to push relevant comments worth reading to the top and keep comments that are less worth reading towards the bottom. Flagging says "this comment/post should not exist," while downvoting here only says "the value of reading this comment is comparatively low." It's pretty straightforwardly the opposite of upvoting ("the value of reading this comment is comparatively high").

This usage is subtly different from the more common meaning of upvoting/downvoting elsewhere, which is "I like/dislike this," and the HN community goes to great lengths to try and remind people of that difference (with obviously less than perfect success - it's very ingrained!)

Personally I try to only downvote when I think a comment is of low conversational quality, not just because I disagree with it. That usually involves me believing that the poster is posting in bad faith, is being too emotional to convincingly convey a point (when relevant), is flat out factually incorrect, etc. I will also usually throw in a downvote on things I've flagged (spam) just to get the comment a little more out of the way before it gets completely killed by flags.

As to a deeper "why," I think the reason is the same as participating in any other form of communal conversation. We're all just trying to convey valuable information to each other, whether that's by authoring text or influencing rankings of existing texts. Whatever drives you to write and comment is also what should drive you to vote.

Your understanding of it seems far less stressful than mine! I like the idea of voting on conversational quality rather than agree/disagree. Sometimes disagreement really just means surprised or offended, and sometimes those are conversations worth having.

I also hadn't thought of the fact that it moves them up/down - that part I actually love. I wish it only did that, and didn't make the downvoted ones literally fade away lol kinda ridiculous. I get hiding flagged or inappropriate of course.

Thanks for your answer!

> I wish it only did that, and didn't make the downvoted ones literally fade away

Oh I disagree. I think fading downvoted comments is a great idea, though I prefer them to be less intensely faded out than HN defaults to (I use a custom stylesheet and tune them to be more readable but still clearly faded). While I'm sure I have the capacity to manually evaluate a numeric score and internalize it as context, I'd much rather have the same information conveyed visually in a way that encourages the action that I'm likely to choose to perform (ie, skipping the comment). Reducing the contrast of a comment makes it take more effort to read, which makes me instinctively not want to read it, so I can skip all the cognitive load of "how much is this downvoted? oh, to -3? it's probably not worth reading then, maybe I'll continue on with the rest of the thread and come back to this if I see a reason to." I'm a big proponent of visual design that offloads cognitive load to existing fixed-function chunks of the brain so I can focus more of my attention on the things I actually care about.

> I use a custom stylesheet and tune them to be more readable

See this is what I'm missing!

To me it invokes laughter for some reason - like the message is sailing off into the fog, bye! I'm like "what's that message way off in the distance? Well it's too far gone now" They should make the font size shrink too as it slowly fades away. Lol don't know why it makes me laugh. Like those air-powered guy dancer things at car dealerships it's funny for no reason other than form.

In a very basic sense I tend to downvote posts that are very poorly worded and I disagree with their content. That's not an absolute case because sometimes there are posts that are very poorly worded and I may agree with their content but they suck so bad I will downvote them because they're not adding any value. Not even the value of being a good troll post.

Posts that look like they have put some thought or effort into whatever their conclusions are or the discussion that they're making I will tend to either not vote or upvote regardless of whether I agree with the post overall or not. When someone is taking the time to make a salient point I believe that needs to be recognized for consideration.

The voting system has its pros and cons but if you have a reasonably mature audience it should ultimately balance out. Just because I find no value or I believe that is a poorly worded or thought out post others may disagree and so my one down vote means nothing.

I do get the general impression that some people up or down vote purely based upon their agreement or disagreement with the content of the message. Not only as it relates to some of the things that I posted but I have also seen other comments be downvoted to the point you can't hardly see them but the person seem to be making a genuine thought out argument in their post. It was unpopular argument but it appeared to me well thought out. Ultimately I don't think anyone person can answer why people like or dislike a certain types of content. I think when you take broad groups of people you can make some generalizations that certain groups of people based upon their backgrounds and educational levels dislike having their worldview challenged and react badly to it. Other people based on their backgrounds and education levels and so forth are more open-minded about having their worldview challenged even if it doesn't change their mind. They are open to the Socratic method of learning and defending what your beliefs and understandings are. I find most people on hacker News fall into that second category they seem to genuinely want to have a discussion around its merits even if they don't change their mind. They generally seem to respect that other people may have a different belief in certain areas and that's not necessarily wrong it's just different.

> mature audience

> seem to genuinely want to have a discussion around its merits

So true, and I think that's what overall makes HN worth it in a way that Discord or Reddit are ultimately not. Heavy moderator culture tends to render human beings at their worst: Authority for sport, conformity for survival - it's an ugly way to exist with others.

The baseline respect here out of mutual intellectual curiosity is huge. Thanks for your comment!