YC Voting Incentives Problem | Hacker News Reader

YC Voting Incentives Problem

2 pointscuri17 comments

If you post a comment on a recent thread, and there's only a couple other comments on about 1-4 points, then if you want your comment to be on top and get the most discussion and feedback (and maybe karma too), you have an incentive to downvote the competition to raise the relative score of your comment.

That is a bad incentive to have. Anyone have a good idea to fix it?

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It's fairly obvious when someone has done this, because comments don't often have 0 points here. And if a bunch of comments all have zero points, and someone else's comment is on top with one point, people can kinda guess who did it...

PG has been known to look at who did the downvoting in cases like this (yes, that information is on the server) and penalize them. So you do have an incentive not to be a tool. People take notice.

So, as you point out, the strategy would work better if you don't downvote anything to zero. And don't downvote very many things.

This isn't how I see the incentives. I am much more likely to game the system by voting up all surrounding comments if they are at a level of one. Then, I figure people will wonder why my comment only has one karma compared to a bunch of other good comments with two karma. And maybe a voting frenzy will start.

I usually vote up stories where I comment as well. I figure if they are worth discussing, they are worth voting up and it also makes my comment more likely to be voted higher.

This story has a bunch of comments, including one with 4 points, but only has 2 points itself. I think it's actually common to comment on a story and not upvote it. I know I do that often.

One reason is people often comments on stories they dislike, so they can call the author a tool, or whatever.

Easy: don't be a tool.

I've never seen this. More common is if someone posts a comment on a mediocre article and then votes up the article.

I don't think this happens very often. But I'm writing some software now to fix various abuses involving downvoting (mainly karma-bombing, where one person tries to nuke another's karma by downvoting any comment by them), and will write more if necessary.

Here's a question I've been pondering...

How exactly do you vote someone down anyway? I only have up-voting options. My guess is that you need some level of Karma first, but what's the threshold?

You get the downvote arrow for comments when you have 20 karma.

Do you really down vote on other comments to be on top?

Maybe if YC comments could be arranged by points or time in which they were posted (of course keeping the conversational style).

It isn't good to design systems with bad incentives, whether people follow them or not.

Im not talking about looking who have more points, but looking for the recent comments, in that way you can keep track of the thread. Also most pointed comments tend to be very good.

Sometimes you see threads with a huge amount of comments, sure, you read it 2 hours ago and you want to see if there are new comments, that's why it would be great to arrange the comments that way.

I was responding to the personal question.

You're right that sorting by time would change that incentive, and that it'd be a useful option sometimes.

I didn't think someone would go to such lengths to seek attention... kinda sad.

Oh this reminds me, there is a similar incentive to upvote stories you commented on so more people see the story and potentially join in the comments discussion.

Thats a good point, maybe adding the number of unique visitors who viewed that thread into the description like:

Thread Title

(x points by YCusername, Y views, Z comments).

Its just an idea but it may work.

I'm a fan of view counters on forums and elsewhere but I know they usually aren't enabled because they are a strain on the server resources.

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