Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

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> The majority of HN users are thoughtful and nice. It's clear from the data that they reliably downvote jerks and trolls

I have to say, I'm a bit confused now. Aren't "trolls" the sorts of comments that are supposed to be flagged[0]? (I understand that spam is meant to be flagged, but HN gets very few true spam comments[1]).

What is the difference between downvoting and flagging for comments specifically - and more importantly, what comments should be downvoted?

I've read conflicting arguments (both sides quoting pg, incidentally) that disagree on whether or not downvotes should be used to signify disagreement, or whether one should downvote comments that are on-topic but have little substance (ie, most one-liners).

[0] I guess this depends on your definition of "troll", but I think a well-executed troll is similar to Poe's law: the reader can't tell whether the commenter is being flippant/rude or sincere. In other words, it's just enough to bait someone into responding, without realizing immediately that it's a worthless comment.

[1] eg, ads for substances one ingests to change the size of a particular masculine organ, or (less blatantly) direct promotions for off-topic products.

Do both, flag and downvote. Think of flagging as something used by data-mining that the moderators are doing offline; when you flag something, you're calling it to their attention. Not every bad comment needs to be brought to the mods attention, so be a little bit thoughtful. But not too much; my understanding is that not enough people are flagging.

Out of curiosity, do you (personally) downvote either comments that you disagree with (e.g. "We should all be using DNSSEC for better security"), or comments that are factually incorrect (e.g. "Heartbleed was caused by incorrect use of null-terminated strings in C")?

(I assume neither of these are inherently flag-worthy assuming they're made in earnest and not egregious).

I try not to downvote disagreement, except when I feel like downvoting will keep me from writing a boring disagreeable comment.

Indeed, I usually see at least one or two comments a day (out of a thousand) that I find to be so completely void of content or contribution that I feel they merit a downvote. But, in 6+ years, I've only flagged about a half dozen comments (if that) - usually vitrolic, racist, or homophobic slurs that have already been nuked into downvote oblivion.

You should flag a comment when you not only think it is bad, but that the entire class of comments it belongs to should never be on HN. Flagging alerts moderators and, increasingly, algorithms. It's ok to flag as well as downvote a comment, since they do different things. But flagging should be rarer than downvoting.

As for exactly when to downvote: that's harder to put into words, but here are my half-baked thoughts.

Don't be indiscriminate. When a comment is blatantly false, downvoting is probably ok, especially when there's something else wrong with the comment. But high-quality, polite posts don't deserve penalizing just because you don't share their position. When you see one of those in negative territory, please be a good citizen and upvote it back to par. Users doing that is one of the community's self-correcting mechanisms, and it's more important now that we've made some downvotes more powerful.

Two things we can say for sure, though. One is that unsubstantive and/or uncivil comments can fairly be downvoted; the other is that complaining about being downvoted is off-topic.

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