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On certain topics, HN always had a downvote problem for certain contrarian opinions. For example, heaven forbid you didn't think everything Apple produced when Steve Jobs was alive was a gift from heaven. Anything questioning that was always downvoted, even if presented in a non-snarky way.

It was so bad that pg even introduced a downvote floor (-5) to keep people from shedding hundreds of points of karma when the downvote brigade inevitably pounced. This simple change really helped with user engagement and breaking up some of the more fantastic group think here IMHO.

We're just seeing a different form of what HN has always had, but just on different topics. Just like the karma floor "fixed" the old downvote brigades, some kind of adjustment will probably fix what's going on these days.

> On certain topics, HN always had a downvote problem for certain contrarian opinions. For example, heaven forbid you didn't think everything Apple produced when Steve Jobs was alive was a gift from heaven

Also see: Snowden is not a hero, Piracy is not ok & The NSA snooping is not so bad.

I'd add anything negative about Aaron Schwartz to the list.

Only after he died. Before then, HN wasn't too thrilled with his tactics.

The sad thing is all of those things are opinon-based and if we all started downvoting every opinion we disagree with then the comments here would surely be doomed.

Would be nice if heavily downvoted comments (even if they were countered with even heavier upvotes) were reviewed once in a while and if they contained no 'bad' material the downvoters downvoting privileges would be rescinded.

Those three opinions are heavily oriented towards an acceptance of totalitarism, and that's probably why most of the HN crowd is not fond of them.

- Snowden is a traitor: all hail secret laws! Burn the dissidents! All hail totalitarism! We should never be able to say to anyone what's wrong when we discover illegal and illegitimate actions!

- Piracy is not okay: leads to "we should stop piracy", which leads to horrible things like either "trusted computing" and willingly or not willingly executing malware on your own machines, or censorship and total global surveillance.

- The NSA snooping is not so bad: you discover that some government agencies have more power than the president of those countries (the intelligence community have the ultimate power to blackmail anyone and their mother), but it's not so bad, they are obviously "good people" so they don't misuse it.

When you are a hacker, you know that anything has flaws (especially humans) and that we don't live in the teletubbies world, so you can't trust an entity that has so much power.

Yeah, no wonder those opinions are shunned on HN.

I believe the fix is simple - don't start fading out downvoted comments until a certain threshold of negativity has been reached. I think the visual 'reward' of being able to silence a commenter without effort or reply contributes a great deal to the noisy and petty nature of initial downvotes.

I've long thought that downvotes should require a comment. Perhaps a better idea is that dowvotes past a certain threshold require a comment.

I know I've been downvoted in the past for various innocent comments and have no idea why the groupthink thought that comment in particular had to die.

As has been observed here before, downvotes are often a normative function of the groupthink. But unless corrective action is suggested with the downvote, nothing normative can come out of it other than to not participate at all.

Yep. I have been truly baffled more than once by a downvote on a comment. The first time it happened I made the mistake of asking why... and that one got downvoted even more. Strange.

Of course, questioning and complaining about downvotes is considered a downvotable offense here, since doing so doesn't contribute to the intellectual quality of the conversation. So that behavior is kind of encouraged in a way. Strange that the effect of downvoting itself isn't also considered a form of noise.

I don't know whether requiring comments for downvotes would help though - presumably if someone were willing or able to articulate the reason for their disagreement they would have done so. The last thing we need is for downvotes to be accompanied by threads full "idiot" and "shill," etc.

Questioning a downvote in an attempt to learn should not be downvoted... as it does contribute to the overall intellectual quality of the site. There are some very clear reasons for some comments to get downvoted. But some comments get downvotes for no obvious reason. Complaining about them is not helpful.

I don't think requiring a comment to downvote would work either. Of course if people did comment things like "idiot" and "shill", then those comments would rightly be downvoted for name-calling and personal attacks. That would just be a mess.

I think that's a great idea. Yes, anonymity is required so people can speak freely without fear of retribution. But you have to also consider what it's like to be the recipient of those anonymous actions...

People care about this community, and they're sharing their opinions in good faith -- they're putting themselves out there. So I think a downvote should require at least an equal commitment -- maybe a downvote with an (anonymous?) comment of explanation....

Maybe the downvote-with-comment could also be downvoted (with that new downvote affecting the karma of the original anonymous down-voter?)

I believe that one of the intents behind the fading-out of comments is to invoke OCD and encourage corrective upvoting for comments that don't deserve it.

I do think it should start at -1 points and not 0 points, however.

In related news, reddit is now introducing a karma floor of sorts; they recently announced that though negative karma would still accrue without limit, negative karma below -100 would just be displayed as -100.

Yeah, the downvote brigade problem rears its head whenever I try to discuss the ISP side of the network neutrality debate. I don't even necessarily agree with all of it -- but I feel it's a perspective that is sorely missing in most internet discussions of the topic.

Heaven forbid you treat Internet routing and content delivery like a business and try to align profit incentives with societally desired outcomes - the HN opinion seems to be that all Internet peering and access should be free to everyone (nevermind that a lot of companies make a lot of money off of it).

I'm of the opinion that posts should be upvoted whether you agree with them or not - if it's a well-spoken argument, it adds to the discussion. Good arguments strengthen everyone: if someone replies to your post with a well-worded argument that you have no answer for, someone else with more knowledge on the subject or a different perspective might have one that reinforces your position.

IMO there should be a "mod override" that allows moderators to set the floor on certain controversial posts to 1. This could ensure informative posts don't get buried just because the majority happens to disagree with the opinion presented. HN as a community is pretty good at encouraging discussion and avoiding groupthink, but it's still a problem on certain topics.

The current state of affairs is not much better than Reddit (I'm talking about /r/programming here specifically, as I used to be a long time reader who switched to HN several years back), honestly. There's just a bit less vitriol on average (but also less humor). I don't know what the solution is either. To your point about "resist[ing] letting irksome things irk you" - I agree, and it can be very hard. It takes dedicated practice to become "well-adjusted" to the world around us. The degree to which you can change the world around you is much smaller than the degree to which you can change yourself.

I'd recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKYJVV7HuZw

Then, if you liked it, listen to the entire speech that was the inspiration behind it (the video above is only a small section and I don't really like it but I put it first because I think it's more accessible than the entire thing for the uninitiated): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

I tackled the problem by not calling it a downvote but a "reprimand". Upvotes are called "rewards".

I've never seen anyone used a "reprimand" yet, but rewards are used generously. Also, I periodically gives out a number of reward tickets that people can use to reward people, they're far superior than reprimand tickets, so I guess people think twice before reprimanding someone and losing the chance to reprimand someone else who really deserves it.

It's a smaller community so I don't know how it would do on Hackernews, but the power of words, etc...

ps: to give more info about how I do it, I also don't use upward/downward arrows. They would suggest a sorting of some sort. You can also reprimand multiple times someone, but he will only lose 1 point of karma. So you won't lose 20 points because of a comment.

How do people attain downvoting privileges? A possible solution would be to simply remove many people's downvoting ability. Reserve the right for an elite few who have insightful things to say and are sparing in their usage.

This is a new account and I've found that it's surprisingly liberating to not have a downvote option. When I disagree with someone, I can either reply or I can just ignore the comment. Good content will sift to the top anyway through upvotes. I would be interested in discovering any issues behind such a system.

I think you get it at 500 karma.

Maybe it'd be a good idea for the site admins to check the first 5-10 downvotes of someone who just received downvoting privileges, and if they're inappropriately used, take the downvoting privileges away from that person.

Some sort of double checking of downvotes is pretty common in many places that do support them. We had metamoderation even in good old slashdot.

Now, at least there are plenty of HN users that are active looking at downvoted content, and bringing it back up if they think the downvote was unfair. This behavior could be used to evaluate frequent downvoters: If someone consistently downvotes comments that end up in the positives, then maybe their downvoting privileges should be revoked.

An algorithm like that should be pretty easy to tweak too: Start with removing, say, the bottom 1% in ranked downvoting quality, and alter it as needed.

Ah, great idea!

I've definitely seen people downvoting based on popular opinion rather than the merit of a comment. It's definitely a deterrent to me commenting if I think there's a chance people won't agree with me. My solution has really been to just stop commenting altogether, since "me too" comments are so useless.

No, it is worse than reddit. reddit has a way to deal with the noise. With HN you get noise or silence in too many cases.

I think it still speaks volumes to HN's credit that a lot of wrongful downvotings are self-correcting. On almost any other site, message board, subreddit, or commenting section, you'd expect to see downvotes' becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy every time. The second something is 'in the grey,' it stays there, and gets worse. On HN, certain measures prevent that from happening -- but people also go to the trouble of upvoting things out of the grey, which is highly unusual by Intenet standards.

It's interesting to look at the group psychology of downvoting. The second something appears grey, a threshold has been crossed. A signal is raised. Everyone else who swings by sees a sort of implicit permission to downvote the comment, because it's already been downvoted, and hence, something about it must be worth downvoting. Before someone even reads the comment, they approach it with a downvote-ready mentality. You're conditioned to react negatively to a grey comment even before you read it, and that's a very powerful prompt.

HN self-corrects in a lot of cases, and that's interesting not only in the context of the Internet at large, but also in the context of human psychology. To read a greying comment with an open mind, and then go against the evident grain to re-upvote it, requires conscious and considered thought. It requires the activation of what Kahneman would call "System 2."[1] Most people don't vote in System 2; they vote in System 1.[2] HN seems to be different, and that's no small feat. It gives me hope, even if the trendline appears to be getting worse.

At the same time, I'm wondering if it's time for HN's admins to raise the karma threshold required for downvotes. Perhaps 500 (the commonly assumed number) is too low?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory

[2] I'd love to see a psychology study of internet commenting, whereby the study uses eye-tracking to determine if people actually read comments before casting a vote. My hypothesis is that upvotes usually follow the reading, while downvotes often precede the reading. Particularly if something is already grey.

Isn't that one reason why the karma level for downvoting was initially set as fluid on HN? I still can't downvote, but I rarely (if ever) come across an instance where I would use it here.

Hacker news mods have repeatedly said that they only respect professionalism, and they intentionally ban people they feel are controversial to a strong degree. So long as this is true, you are going to lose the passionate 1% of the community. The passionate 1% are those who keep the rest of the riff raff in check ultimately.

As far as I am concerned, "Do you want X? This is how you get X."

If Hacker News wants to have people care, it has to allow differing and terrible opinions. This is the very basis of the notion of freedom and free speech. When you censor the community, the community will suffer.

Note that upvoting and downvoting, especially when done via groups of people determined to make their comments be heard, can itself tend to become a type of censorship ( mass downvoting ). Votes should be purely for the benefit of the original authors of the comments being voted on; not to move content around.

Banning people that are obnoxious is a different thing than banning people that are controversial.

It also seems to be the case that there are a lot less bans since dang became a public moderator, I only see them hitting new accounts that get mistaken for spam.

> It used to be that you could hold a contrarian opinion and not be at risk of being jumped on by the community or your position being misinterpreted. That seems no longer the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8143432

Asking a question many times ("what law has been broken?") is a form of trolling. You may not have meant it as such, but that may well be how it's seen. Since the EU privacy directive is explained in very many places across the Internet just asking questions is effectively concern trolling.

It's cool that your response here is to explain why the comment got down voted. It would be helpful if people would explain their down votes -- preferably in the concise and non-accusatory tone you used here. The down vote itself is unlikely to change behavior, but the explanation is potentially very helpful. Coming from Redit or the like, people might not realize there are communities where quality is important. It also gives you a chance to think "hey, am I down voting for good reason or just a difference of opinion?"

I don't think the community has a problem. It's more that we're out of options.

Most people (as far as I understand) downvote for a huge variety of reasons. Some are not acceptable by others. I trust the everybody knows WHAT a downvote is, so they are using it as best as they can.

I've been downvoted for my answers, when they were either politically different from some people OR they contained some form of bad language (e.g. irony). So all in all from I've seen, the downvoting system works fine as far as I can tell. If we had more options then might be better.

The downvote trend increased after the comment scores were hidden.

Before that, only the most egregious comments would go below -2.

I guess that having a negative score was seen as a sufficient punition.

I wholeheartedly agree. Downvoting people simply because you disagree with their viewpoint is an abomination. It should be a tool for discouraging abusive language or non-constructive discourse that doesn't add value to a conversation. I've been downvoted many times simply because I expressed a perfectly valid opinion that someone simply didn't like.

I have been down voted when there was a 10+ reply to my comment and question. I was told I was totally off base and needed to read the article.

I read the article and quoted exactly showing what I was talking about down voted again so that maybe people wouldn't see that they were actually wrong.

My favorite community right now is Google+ for R and VIM. Down votes are focusing on disagree and not constructive.

Unless you are sensitive about the karma score then downvoting, or upvoting to determine where a viewpoint falls in the thread seems valid.

Personally, I upvote comments that I strongly agree with, and I don't think someone downvoting ones they disagree with is that big a jump.

There doesn't seem to be an expressly specified code around voting, and I suspect that this might be a deliberate attempt to let the community decide out of unspoken consensus. When concern about the basis of a vote is expressed, it's often made clear that the grounds for up voting and down voting are not symmetrical. I can't decide if I think that they should be or if it doesn't matter.

I'd really like to see a list of controversial posts (many votes in both direction) to determine whether they are mostly matters of agreement/disagreement or if there is usually some less personal ground (e.g. expressing a factually wrong but popularly held belief, differing opinions on what adds to the discussion or not etc.)

People are sensitive about karma scores. Moreover, this site actually grays out downvoted comments, sometimes to the point that they're nearly unreadable. This is not consistent with the premise that votes are just to accumulate the distribution of opinions on a topic.

Give me a break. You sound exactly like the elderly folks you always hear saying "things used to be so much better, nobody saying "Sir" and "Ma'am" anymore...kids these days have no manners."

The commenting ecosystem on the internet has always been a coarse and insensitive place, and it always will be. This is not a new thing.

Ironically, this is a perfect example of a comment that never would have been written in the old days.

There may have been an instance here or there of HN being coarse or insensitive, but it was the exception and not the rule. Evidently, that has reversed.

So any rebuttal to the "it used to be so much better" trope that is trotted out every few months is now made into an example of how "bad" things have gotten?

Not at all. I'm open to rebuttals. But a good rebuttal comes with examples. It's possible to prove me wrong simply by showing a bunch of instances of how things weren't any better five years ago than today.

How would one provide an example of the general 'feel' of an environment? While everyone in support of it is using the subjective feeling that it has gotten worse, the only evidence for or against it would involve aggregating all posts over time and seeing how the various averages worked out.

Basically you are asking for evidence of a counter theory that has never been required of the prevailing one.

HN used to have a pervasive gentleman culture, to the point of being mocked as uptight by proggit because of it.

Hm, no. The author actually gots it wrong :-)

Go to the early days of IRC, BBS and Mailing Lists and see what kind of flames flew around for just asking what other people considered lame.

HN community is really polite!