A HN post with negative points – how? | Hacker News Reader

A HN post with negative points – how?

news.ycombinator.com

89 pointsdonohoe87 comments

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Original poster of the thread here.

Doesn't appear to be negative anymore, but here is what it looked like: https://vale.rocks/micros/20260512-0652

Screenshot was taken at 06:50 UTC.

Do you have any idea on what caused it?

https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663

This seems to have gone to -10 and then went up according to this, which matches what your comment had said that you were seeing -10 on your android.

Edit: (actually it had gone all the way to -15) and seems that this website has been still stuck at -8 upvotes at the moment of this comment and this link has also been the proof for me to finally see/confirm this as the submission now has positive upvotes.

It is hardly a satisfying answer, but I haven't the foggiest what caused it. I submitted it the same as I've submitted many other submissions in the past.

A guess would be it got a story flag -4 points.

Then something happened that overrode the show score, which is not the same as the real score for stories.

Like you did a edit? (after it got one flag, which would not be seen)

(Random guess)

[Edit] Up votes wouldn't change it until it got back to zero since -3 is not valid.

The external -10 might be too many comments with a low score is not good

Maybe there is an API to downvote posts and some bots found it?

Edit: Actually I would wager that it’s some kind of automatic downvoting when the system detects bad votes or comments. Something like “friends shouldn’t vote”. Since we see voting on posts and not comments we could see it go negative.

I suspect there’s downweights the system can apply - and if five people voted it up, the -5 downweight was applied, and then four of the upvotes were removed, you’d end up at -4.

Not at all related, but I love your work! Your photographs betray a subtle, curious, particular, and respectful eye. Keep shooting!

Thanks. That is really nice of you to say.

My comment on the other thread meanwhile wasn't nice at all, but it was also misdirected, and meant to refer to Hacker News rather than your own site.

(I like the style, too. It's good to see Helvetica get a deserved reevaluation, now that the millennial generation is aging out of even being able to imagine we are cool. Or ever were.)

My own profile on this website may help elucidate my perspective on the matter. I'm both shadowbanned and have applied a hundred-year "noprocrast" countdown, and it's frankly embarrassing how little that actually does to get the website not to accept those few contributions I still care to make.

It is as if the folks who run this place were getting a little desperate! - both for the "crowdsourced" unpaid work that goes into making this website worthy of interest, and for the last dwindling taste of what was once termed the "hacker spirit" by fringey weirdo ideologues like Stallman and Barlow.

(The idea that HTTP GET requests must be idempotent for safety, for example, has totally passed by this site's implementors and maintainers, or maybe never made a dent. Hence the subject of this very thread!)

In any case I regret the misplaced comment, and apologize for the dismay it likely caused. This website is embarrassing, and has just about run its course. Yours is not embarrassing at all, and I hope you're just getting started!

As I understand it, -4 is the lowest you can get (basically everyone hates your point of view), so you may have found a bug but more likely found 5 or so people who don’t like you quicker than expected!

I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4)

But someone with sight of codebase might have more useful comments

the interesting part here is that it is a submission with negative karma, not a comment.

there is no downvote button on submissions, so it doesnt make sense for it to get negative karma.

I always assumed there WAS downvoting for a submission once you hit a certain threshold of user karma. Like flagging and other community moderating functions.

I have not hit it yet, if there is one. Only options are upvoting, flagging, etc.

Same. Maybe flags count as -1 after enough?

Yes there is.

(Open question to anyone reading this)

I've been meaning to ask for quite a while now: What exactly is "flag" supposed to indicate?

I assume it's something more specific than "dislike". I take it to mean something along the lines of, "I think this is (sneaky) spam", or "This does not fit on a technology news site, even tangentially.". Or, perhaps something broader like, "I can't describe what the problem is, but this submission/comment should be reviewed by a moderator."

It's just never been particularly clear what the intention of it is.

> The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away. But there's a new 'hide' link for people to click if they'd just like not to see a story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173809

Ah, interesting. Thanks!

Regardless of the intended purpose. The most common use case is super dislike.

FWIW: I have over 135K karma and I can't downvote submissions.

83,000 karma and no downvote button on submissions for me.

I think that a submission might get negative votes for being flagged, though, so if 11 people hit the "flag" button that might take it to -10.

A bit offtopic but seeing your karma, I remembered that sometime ago I had made a website which finds how many words a person has written on hackernews and leaderboard stats around it.

I got curious so I checked it with your account and you are globally #23 in that you have written most words and you have written 1,822,427 words which is like 6+ games of thrones (if one GOT has around 300k words)

I also just saw that you have been on hackernews since feb 2007

Your hackernews account is older than me as I was born in 2008 ;)

I am curious how did you find hackernews and what you made stick to the platform for so long and are you perhaps some user number x of hackernews itself like say user number 230 of hackernews, I would be curious to find this data if you might know.

I do wonder if there are any tips in general life that you have for a person like me and I would love to hear your answers!

Thanks for reading and have a nice day :-D

https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/

They come in mobs or waves, too. Historically, they show up first while the reasonable people show up later, sometimes reversing those votes. Others here have noted that phenomenon.

> But in the end HN is biased for positivity

Ha ha ha.

When I click on 'A HN post with negative points – how?' from the HN homepage (currently ranked 12 for me), it goes to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663 instead of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316 (I found the latter via google search for the title string)

I suspect the same is happening for some others too, based on the comments on that article.

Bizarre!

Update: 2 minutes later and the link from the hn home page now correctly leads to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316

Never seen that happen before.

This post you are commenting on (*6316) is a link post that points to the other one (*4663)

The normal behavior for link posts in HN is that the title takes you to the link address, not to the post address.

To enter the post address, you need to hit the "discuss"/"x comments" button.

So, what you describe is HN working as expected AFAICT, it's just a bit counterintuitive because it's an HN post linking to another, which is uncommon

Here is a self referencing HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33130986

Pointers are hard

This post has been added as a link, instead of a comment one. Then when you click on it you go the linked page.

LGTM

Take this post for instance, the link to the upvote is https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=48106316&how=up&auth=26...

If you change `how=up` to `how=down` it downvotes the post.

I tried it once, didn't change the vote count, but I issued the inverse operation with `how=un` and the vote count went up, so I'm guessing someone upvoted at the same time I downvoted. That or it doesn't really work like it says it does, but it does respond with a 301 followed by an OK, so I think this works.

This.

I tried this and had no change with either down or the subsequent un, using my own upvote link's token.

Perhaps someone coincidentally upvoted the post at the same time you attempted to undown the submission, rather than upvoting when you attemped to downvote it.

Good to know! So the hypothesis is false.

dang:

>Looks like we have a race condition that someone triggered by using a script to rapidly upvote and then unvote the submission. I'm not sure whether to be grateful or pissed. Perhaps I'll settle on grateful once I've fixed it.

>In the meantime, please don't anybody else do this!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114191

I bet some anti-spam measure was inadvertently tripped that dampened the submission popularity, while a bug failed to conceal it.

Someone should email dang as that would be a bug or a fundamental design change or a site compromise. hn@ycombinator.com

Someone? Who are we going to choose?

You needn't; I just did.

Mr. Gackle isn't really all that frightening, you know. There's no need to fear talking with him.

In fact he's the opposite of frightening.

True, but it's rude to call that out, not to mention rather more arrogant than wise. These are trepidatory times, and like many, his job is not at all secure. In his shoes I'd be frightened too, and he displays reasonable grace in spite of it; I have done less well at times.

First time something I've posted here has been characterized as rude; I will try to do better in the future.

Emailed him shortly after this comment.

HN has the oddest karma system. I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.

> I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.

Is that people looking at the new page and seeing/upvoting your post and then it falls off the front.

That is many people's posts when I am reviewing new submissions.

That's probably the submitter's friends voting.

It has happened to me and I'm not coordinating with anyone. I have also experienced very rapidly upvoted submissions flagged, then I notified HN admins, had the post unflagged, but after that time it was deep past page 12 and got like 5 more votes over 24 hours.

I haven't seen the negative votes on submissions that people are reporting within this submission, but anyone who thinks HN isn't a target for myriad bad actors employing every means available to them to manipulate votes in whatever direction is a fool.

Ive been curating HN Arcade for a few months now. One thing I noticed is the vast amount of ShowHN games that get 5 karma points. I was thinking this was some sort of boosting system that low karma ShowHN posts get.

OP should have archived the page when the count was negative.

Here's a snapshot from when the count was 0 https://web.archive.org/web/20260512115623/https://news.ycom...

On HN I almost never downvote. On reddit this was different. Not sure why but I feel that on HN karma is so much harder to get that I don't want to be an obstacle. On reddit I could more easily downvote. It also was easier to get karma. (Reddit is annoying with regards to its censorship though. That is one arbitrary censorship over there ...)

But that means more people will get enough karma to be able to downvote, and they likely won't share the same ideals as you so they will downvote more often, making it even harder than it already is for new users.

I downvote obvious fallacies and bad faith. And people who fan the flames in a thread. I don’t downvote posts because I disagree with them, but that’s just me. (I don’t upvote because I agree either)

Overall, it is common to see greyed posts downvoted for questionable reasons, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dead post that did not deserve it. So overall it seems to work and I avoid overthinking it.

Now upvoted, but it was negative

HN has downvotes but you need to have enough karma to access the feature.

Downvotes on comments need a little bit of karma. Now downvotes on submissions, those are not normally doable by random users.

right, I have reasonably high karma and I can't downvote submissions, although I can flag them.

Yea you can't downvote submissions.

Now, the post linked itself has been upvoted so it doesn't have negative submissions but it seems to have had been the case.

I don't quite understand how posts can have negative points :-/

A hunch but maybe a post which got confused as comment id of some other comment which got downvoted so you had negative karma, but I am unsure of this spooky action at a distance. It would be really interesting to know the reason behind it.

Perhaps some kind of auto-downranking system used for moderation of specific topics or thigns (without explicitly removing them) that accidentally targeted said post? Just idle speculation.

which is weird, because normally they just ratelimit you to oblivion and back - not even allow the post in the first place. or just set you to be automatically dead.

unless this is just a glitch of early ranking to get posts onto frontpage that posts start with an invisible negative amount of points and get upvoted out of new and the invisible negatives to frontpage? (eg all posts start out with some value of negative points between -10 and 0 or something and the new votes will help nudge it out to the frontpage?)

Seeing as how HN normally automatically strips "how" out of a title such that "How I Journal" becomes "I Journal", having both "how" and "why" in the title may have been just too much for the modbot to handle on a Tuesday morning.

That's correct AFAIK, submissions can't be downvoted.

If anyone's interested, here's a list of undocumented HN features/rules (although I don't know how up to date it is): https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

This reminds me, I've wanted to make a bot to automatically upvote the most downvoted posts in a thread with the HN api. I'd call it anti-echochamber.HN or something like that.

I surf with showdead on and often find myself upvoting grey comments that don't seem factually incorrect or rude, perhaps just espousing an unpopular opinion. But man, a lot of grey comments are correctly moderated. I'd leave the most downvoted ones alone for sure.

When you press the downvote button, the points decrease. This number can go below zero, into the negatives.

Karma systems in general are opaque. The assumed or advertised behavior is never fully accurate, if it was, it would be all too easy to game.

Bots. I've posted many popular and unpopular takes here. Down always comes first, and as the bot votes evap into the ether, the true human take is almost always revealed after an hour or two.

As stated elsewhere in this discussion: downvotes exist for comments on HN, but not for submissions, as far as anyone is aware, which is what makes it puzzling.

According to tomhow, there isn't and there isn't going to be one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46298942

Explain how the submission got to less than 1 without a downvote then.

Do you realize that tomhow is an admin on this site?

Anyway, it doesn't have to be bots... maybe some 3rd-party client app is implementing the downvoting of submissions via (unofficial) API calls.

None of that changes the root cause. Bots are downvoting.

How this submission got negative votes is the oddity that people are trying to figure out. Regular users can't downvote, and I don't see a reason why it'd be a moderator action for this post, so I'd assume some bug/edge-case in vote handling.

No other /newest submissions (current or that I've previously seen) have negative score. I checked a bunch of your submissions (using https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663) and none appear to have ever been negative.

It's possible that this issue was happened to be caused by a bot, but what you're describing as a regular occurrence ("Down always comes first") is probably a misrecollection about comment downvotes rather than submission downvotes - or about reddit which does have submission downvotes.

[flagged]

-5 now! Made it -4 for you

Although negative profiles have always been a thing.

You cannot easily downvote submissions, in fact I'm not even sure if you can.

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