Hn Downvote notes | Hacker News Reader

Hn Downvote notes

136 pointsvezycash130 comments

I propose a "reason for down vote" feature to be added to hn.

It should be optional.

The reason won't be part of the discussion thread. A small button close to the comment can link to the for the down vote.

Why add this?

People who get down voted (esp noobs to the community) have no idea why they were. As a result can't figure out how to change our avoid such in the future.

Also trigger happy down voters might get to think carefully about WHY before they do.

Punishment without reason in real life is known as wickedness, cruelty, bullying...

This would be better for not just community but for the internet as a whole.

View on HN

I disagree completely.

Any "feature" that encourages people to spend more energy thinking about the reasons for being down voted is just promoting whinging and self-absorbed discontent. (Which, a: no one wants to see, and b: is bad for the people going through it!)

I do feel that down votes should not be used for disagreement, but the practical matter of fact is that they are and will be, both because pg endorses the idea, and because people are people. If they have a negative response to reading something, and a down arrow is convenient, it will be used.

Downvotes are not punishment. They just mean someone didn't like what you wrote, but couldn't be arsed to respond. Maybe what you wrote didn't deserve a response, maybe they were confused, maybe the topic is incredibly important to you but not to them. Who cares? We're adults, ja?

As an alternative, I wouldn't be disappointed if the threshold for greying out was reduced to -3 or so. And full death at -10?

And for new users who might not know why they're being downvoted, how about a link to the rules next to any comment of yours that is score-negative? HN already puts an orange star next to your comments, so the pages are dynamic at least to that extent.

Personally, I use downvotes exclusively for hostility. I upvote any greyed comment that is respectful, coherent, and relevant.

> both because pg endorses the idea

He did at one time mention that. But he also said this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057347

which seems to not like downvote for disagreement.

> As an alternative, I wouldn't be disappointed if the threshold for greying out was reduced to -3

That feels like a good idea: Don't change the gray level until a post has had 3 downvotes.

While I was reading the thread, this comment just posted mentioned that the site founder, pg, has endorsed the idea that the site's rules permit downvoting to express disagreement. By the site rules, implicitly, some comments should be downvoted on sight.

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

"Essentially there are two rules here: don't post or upvote crap links, and don't be rude or dumb in comment threads."

Yes, downvote thoughtfully, and downvote to improve the overall quality of discussion here, but a downvote in an active discussion to silently indicate a comment is 1) uncivil and unconstructive, or 2) factually incorrect, or 3) both is okay.

A comment that is solely on the issue of being downvoted is subject to being downvoted on sight, because those sorts of comments are never constructive to the discussion and disfavored by the site guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

The site founder, pg, (who no longer has an active day-by-day role in moderating the site) has commented that downvotes for disagreement are permitted here.

(In order of time of posting.)

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

"IIRC we first had this conversation about a month after launch. Downvotes have always been used to express disagreement."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691

"I sometimes downvote things that seem mistaken. I think most users do."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006808

"If there's one thing I wish I could do to improve HN, it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically.

. . . .

"The problem with the middlebrow dismissal is that it's a magnet for upvotes. The 'U R a fag's get downvoted and end up at the bottom of the page where they cause little trouble. But this sort of comment rises to the top. Things have now gotten to the stage where I flinch slightly as I click on the 'comments' link, bracing myself for the dismissive comment I know will be waiting for me at the top of the page."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

This is an ongoing issue, but the key idea is both to upvote and to downvote (and, for that matter, to submit stories and to post comments) in way that elevates the quality of discussion here. Grow a thick enough skin to learn from other users' behavior here, and develop curiosity about why other users might disagree with you, and all will be well.

> Personally, I use downvotes exclusively for hostility

IMO, noobs might think HN community is hostile & leave. Not many noobs would ask for reason, if they feel intimidated - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9179609

>IMO, noobs might think HN community is hostile & leave.

I believe the parent was referring to downvoting comments that are hostile in tone, not using downvoting as an outlet for his own hostility.

Tone policing is a form of hostility, too.

Well, yes, then I am intolerant of aggressive behaviour and take action to suppress it and its spread.

The simple logic is that hostility obscures the writer's meaning, invites reactive hostility, and pollutes the conversation. I can see no reason to promote it.

Slow down, try again without invective, be civil. It works better.

We are not the powerless disenfranchised citizens of a dictatorial state with no other means of expression. Some of us might be, actually, but not in this setting.

Tone policing disenfranchises minority views, period. Doesn't matter whether the context is social justice or database performance; Unless the tone is beyond well-known bounds (e.g. is abusive, flippant, way off-topic, etc.) I don't think it is generally constructive.

Edit: I think we're talking past each other on where "tone policing" becomes regular old moderation.

He seems to disagree with OP completely. But, I find OP's point about noobs valid:

> People who get down voted (esp noobs to the community) have no idea why they were.

I agree with that part, but disagree with the proposed solution, completely.

I suggested an idea to inform new users in a post upthread (link to guidelines next to any comment of yours that is score-negative), but it would probably be better to link to a page with the guidelines plus a blurb about accidents, confusion, and just not taking it too seriously.

>As an alternative, I wouldn't be disappointed if the threshold for greying out was reduced to -3 or so. And full death at -10?

I think this would go a long way toward resolving people's negative attitudes toward downvotes. The fact that one errant idiot could grey out your post and make it harder for others to read is a bit too far IMO.

> I use downvotes exclusively for hostility

hostility, is subjective.

It's easy to block out any thoughts not comfortable to us.

It's easy to hide behind consensus than risking the cognitive dissonance associated with the truth.

The civil libertarian in me likes to see a bit of heat, expression, emotion; within reason.

I want to challenge my impulses. I want to grow.

Maybe I'm a maverick, but when most people want to downvote, I'd rather see the elaborate more on their unpopular opinion.

We agree. Except for the subjective part.

I'm not talking about hostility to my beliefs. I'm talking about straightforward aggressive angry spouting that happens occasionally, even here, and destroys any attempt at civility.

Up voted. :)

Rather than something complex like this can we get the down and up vote arrows separated? Something simple like putting the arrows on opposite sides of the user's name would be fine. This will stop fat fingered people like me from accidentally down voting a post when I am reading on a mobile device.

This is only a problem because you can't modify your vote. On Reddit, you can change your vote any time before the thread is archived.

It is a problem even if you could modify your vote as a lot of the time I am not sure if I have up voted or down voted a post.

I love HN and its low fi design, but this is the one thing that I think takes away from the community spirt here. Intent should always be clear.

You could tell from which arrow got disabled by your vote.

But both arrows disappear when you vote.

[edit] Or are you suggesting a way in which the site could be modified to reflect your vote? In that case yeah, I think that would work.

Both arrows disappear when I vote (Chrome)

Many online forums resolve the problem you mention by showing your vote. Disqus, for example, simply shows the up arrow button in a blue highlight if you've already upvoted the comment.

If you're using Chrome I can only strongly recommend the HN Enhancement Suite which takes care of this issue: https://github.com/etcet/HNES

Ues, this, a million times. I have done it again and again without the ability to undownvote. I can't even zoom in far enough to be sure that I have hit the correct button.

I'm actually pretty sure I managed to upvote you on mobile, like I intended! Sorry for the strong language but I think it is nothing short of retarded that after so many years and so many complaints this issue has not been fixed yet.

The only reason I know for sure that I up voted you is because you are replying to my post! What do we need to do to fix this - it can't be talent or will given the community.

That's why I'm so surprised this hasn't been fixed yet. I'll go take a looksy tonight to see whether the HN source code is available online.

There is a github thing.

The vote buttons are, as far as I know, a firm and definite won't fix.

The vote buttons are about the only thing I hate about HN on mobile.

Do we have any idea why the vote buttons are a won't fix? Surely it can't be that anyone thinks the current design is good?

This might help with this problem: I reverse pinch gesture the text around the vote arrows for a larger font, vote, then pinch gesture the text back to normal size. This just takes an extra few seconds and is a good workaround.

The trick to avoiding downvotes is avoid to commenting on touchy unpopular topics. What is touchy, well you will know that once you get a few downvotes. Such topics brooke no argument.

Well it has the intended effect of people self-censoring and ensuring homogeneous thinking within HN.

Many downvotes are just when people disagree with a view instead of the post not advancing the discussion.

Anytime I see a downvoted post, I upvote it unless it is really beyond the pale. I suggest those who don't like the irrational downvoting to do the same.

One solution to discourage downvoting for disagreeing is that that downvoting to take effect only after say 3 downvotes have accrued. That means atleast 3 people thought a post didn't advance the discussion.

PS : this is a throwaway, learnt from past experiences

A few days ago I posted about some feature X a company was building for product Y of another company.

One of the first comments was from someone who was excited that this feature was available or at least will be usable in foreseeable time. He got downvoted a gray fast. And one reply said in a very short form that there is no X for Y.

I said to him that the title of the post was "X for Y" and got downvoted to -3 points.

And why all this? Because 1 other person tricked people into thinking that the project was abandoned. Nobody checked if he was right. I myself apologized to the other readers.

When I checked the project's mailing list I was surprised. The project was alive with the founder of the company helping users to download and install X. It's still in early development and a bit complicated. You need the right version of everything at this moment. And you need to have an account to access some parts of Y needed to compile.

I asked the one who said the project is abandoned why he believes this despite an active mailing list. He made something up that wasn't topic in April or May on the mailing list. And said this was a sign of an abandoned project.

Until then the whole post vanished from the front page and nobody cared anymore.

Why should anybody care for the reasons you get downvoted when you can't change anything about if for most of the time?

Comments that are factually correct and non-offensive are often down voted.

Comment negatively about Google? Down vote. Comment negatively about the risks of building your business on the shifting sands of startup SaaS? Down vote.

Ive never seen anyone manage to explain how it is logical to use the same action without any distinction, for any of the following, especially given the result for multiple down-votes is to effectively hide the comment from view:

- "i disagree with this opinion" - "this is offtopic/unrelated" - "this is factually wrong"

The "if more people upvoted, it wouldn't be a problem" excuse is not new, and as I've said elsewhere, it's a ridiculous bandaid solution to a widely acknowledged problem.

If you need a pop culture reference, it's the Walter White solution: "our health care system is completely fucked, but this guy can make and sell illegal drugs to pay for treatment"

I believe you should "pay" 1 karma to downvote. That way, trigger-happy people will be less likely to use it for a slight disagreement.

I think the more pertinent question is: why do we downvote?

If the answer is to signal to others that the comment is not worth reading (by greying it out, dropping it down in the rankings and eventually preventing people from reading it at all) then the reason is sort of immaterial.

On the other hand, if the goal is to adjust behaviour I feel like a downvote (including a downvote-with-reason) is needlessly punitive. Consider the dubious value of a bad-performance-review-with-pay-cut as a behaviour adjustment tool.

While there might have been a time when you could politely correct someone's behaviour in the comments, as HN grows it starts to feel less like a quiet word and more like calling someone out on stage. For that reason I'm very reluctant to do it.

It would be good if there was some way to privately reply to a comment. (Essentially your proposal minus the necessity of downvoting). I'm not sure if there's any way to do that without it being a vector for abuse or disrupting public commentary, but if there is I would definitely use it.

Maybe you could let the recipient of a private comment make it public? And it's not possible to reply to a private comment otherwise? That would be a way of enforcing a certain don't-say-anything-you-wouldn't-want-repeated niceness in private comments, and also prevent them from turning into a mechanism for shadow discussion that takes away from the main comment thread.

Anyway, I definitely agree there is something missing in the HN toolkit for this kind of problem and I hope we can find a way to improve it.

To me, the problem is that down-voting combines down-votes for those that are off-topic or contribute nothing, and down-votes from people who disagree with what was said.

In my opinion, the latter happens far too often which is why this is even a topic.

>It would be good if there was some way to privately reply to a comment. (Essentially your proposal minus the necessity of downvoting). I'm not sure if there's any way to do that without it being a vector for abuse or disrupting public commentary

I have my email address in my HN profile. I take it you wouldn't do that because you believe it makes you too vulnerable to abuse?

Will you please help me understand what you mean by "disrupting public commentary"? Maybe give an example.

Ah. I meant more that if I was a troll and I had the ability to comment privately, I could say nasty things to you in my private comment and nobody else would be able to see them (except admins, I suppose, who would quickly become overloaded).

It's a good point that I could email feedback privately. I think that would be a difficult thing to establish in the general case because it's not expected behaviour, which makes it seem more significant (oh my god, this guy disliked my comment so much that he decided to email me about it?). It would also be more effort, and some people (especially newbies, I would think), don't include contact details in their profile.

By disrupting public commentary I mean that the established norm on HN is that, mostly, if you have something to say you say it to the group. If it was possible to comment privately perhaps it would detract from that group discussion because people are shy or would rather their comment not be subject to scrutiny. The end result could be a tragic migration of the interesting conversations in HN comments from public to private. That's the "shadow discussion" problem I mentioned later.

That's the particular reason I suggested making private comments impossible to reply to, so they don't become an alternate competing venue for discussion. I think the recipient being able to make the comment public would also help act as a balance against shy commenters making perfectly good public comments private.

Thanks for your reply.

I was unable to figure out a way to send you a private message.

There's a link in your profile to a personal web site, but I could not find any contact info on it.

There's a link to your account on Keybase, but 5 minutes of exploration of the Keybase service did not reveal a way to use Keybase to send you a message.

So, I'm curious as to whether it is your intention that a random HN reader such as myself cannot figure out how to send you a private message or whether I'm missing something obvious, or something.

Maybe not obvious - I must have just forgotten to add it!

You can email me at sam@samgentle.com

If you consistently have no idea why you got downvoted, then HN might not be the place for you. Learn quickly to adapt, start lurking more, or find another community without high standards for replies. If you don't read the community guidelines [1] and then complain about negative karma you are to be avoided.

If I did not get downvoted for my very first flame-y, half-assed or dumb replies, then I would have continued making them.

Wickedness and cruelty is forcing low standards upon a community and sucking away all the fun.

With downvoting comes a little responsibility: to not only reward good posts, but lower the visibility of posts that do not contribute to the quality or enjoy-ability of HN. That is why you need 500 upvotes to get downvote functionality.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Translation: become a subservient hive mind conformist wimp.

This is pretty accurate, actually—votes in an Internet community just encourage the hive mind. I just say what I want and never mind my "karma" or "vote count" or whatever it is called in the community.

I know, why don't we just have elections every 4 years for community moderators to represent us. And they can vote/downvote on our behalf! Sounds brilliant.

A bit of a sarcastic tone, yes. But the hive-mind comment strikes at the heart of the issues of "democracy" and group dynamics. I'd even argue that group-moderated internet discussions are more "democratic" than actual democracy, with the only difference being the real-world physical repercussions of said voting.

An excellent benevolent dictator can be so much better than any system where there's a big pressure to converging to the crowd average, or even the lowest common denominator of the crowd.

Most of us joined HN for exactly this reason. It was run in dictator fashion by a guy whose writings and actions showed that he was clearly above what ever be achieved by a general crowd average, at least in a particular area of expertise.

Unfortunately, his other work prevented him from spending much time here, and it's now been years since he left all active involvement in the community entirely.

The departure of the benevolent dictator is almost always catastrophic, as far as I sense. Imagine if Linus had left Linux after just a couple years, or if Guido had left Python after just a couple years. You can start to see evidence of the problems that a disappearing excellent dictator causes in the decision paralysis facing the Bitcoin community now.

What's good, is that the HN successor should appear within the next few years.

It's a totally non-conscious change that keeps pulling you in further. You get so addicted to pleasing, or at least not upsetting the forum. You unknowingly adapt to learn their language, try to stay ahead of the latest themes. Pretty soon, mixed in with the great stuff, you also start believing some total uninformed nonsense that the community has emergently evolved to, and you don't even realize how terribly wrong some of it was until years later when you experience how badly they mislead you first hand.

That includes a few things that HN believes too. So terribly wrong, on a few particular things. No different than religion. We're made to fall for this stuff. People who believe themselves smart, MORE SO than anyone else.

Same reason that parents try so hard to keep their children from "falling in with a bad crowd". Your mind is weak and desperate to please those you're surrounded with.

Don't know why you were downvoted, but have an upvote from me. You nailed it. There is such an assuredness of the rightness of some beliefs here and I have used the word religion to describe it as well.

It's a shame. It's called Hacker News and presumably seemed to have Libertarian leanings that you might expect. Yet, in reality, there is a solid emphasis on conforming over individualism.

A bunch of comformist hackers (oxymoron) and professed libertarians who insist that you believe as they do?

And, to your point, I think a lot of people do conform (knowingly or not). Because, unless everyone actually does agree with one another on everything (not likely), then the choices are to conform or simply stop participating.

I've talked about this a lot with friends, and while voting on aggregated content seems like an obviously good idea, voting on comments is not. On HN it's not a huge problem because it's generally easy enough to read all the comments in a thread, but in busier threads (for examples see popular forums on reddit), minority viewpoints are quickly and efficiently hidden from view. The system is very effective at promoting the most popular viewpoint (at the expensive of every other quality), which makes comment threads boring and predictable.

I feel like my views are reasonably heterodox on HN and the only posts I really get slammed on are the drive-by low-effort ones.

> If you consistently have no idea why you got downvoted, then HN might not be the place for you. Learn quickly to adapt, start lurking more, or find another community without high standards for replies. If you don't read the community guidelines [1] and then complain about negative karma you are to be avoided.

Or even just ask why your post is getting downvotes. Ignore single downvotes; they can be errors, but asking for clarification if you really don't understand why you're getting downvotes usually gets some replies.

> asking for clarification if you really don't understand why you're getting downvotes usually gets some replies.

Unless you sound defensive about it -- that leads to more downvotes.

'if you have to ask, you don't belong'

That is great in theory, but in practice you get a lot of flack if you like Javascript or think Universal Basic Income is a bad idea. You get this flack regardless of the quality of your arguments.

Hn definitely has a hivemind.

I like Javascript. I use it all the time. (Testing... but it's true.)

It's very similar to Reddit in a lot of ways. Say one negative thing about the government and you can expect a lot of downvotes.

Wait what? Just to check: Are you saying that people on HN can't say anything bad about the US government without risking a lot of downvotes?

Yes. It's not the case every single time. I've been upvoted for negative comments about the government but I have to be much more indirect about it. If I'm blatant about it, I get downvoted to hell.

I've had the exact opposite experience (i.e. getting downvotes for saying something in defense of the government). I think political threads tend to lean in one direction pretty quickly. I usually check HN after getting home from work, at which point most threads have already been going on for several hours. At that point, if a thread doesn't already have discussion from multiple sides by then, I don't bother commenting. I feel like at that point you're only going to get downvotes for disagreeing.

Down votes here aren't just for discouraging flames, dumb replies, posts that do not contribute to the quality of HN, and such. PG has stated (several years ago) that down votes are also for indicating disagreement with the poster.

I've seen many thoughtful, well presented, well reasoned posts get down voted almost certainly solely because they argued for a minority opinion on some issue.

>I've seen many thoughtful, well presented, well reasoned posts get down voted almost certainly solely because they argued for a minority opinion on some issue.

Exactly. Advocating downvotes for disagreement simply has the effect of encouraging groupthink. It can also be dismissive of thoughtful people's efforts to contribute something insightful to the discussion.

In fact, there are some topics on HN that are practically undiscussable because the dogma is too entrenched.

But, what's the value of a discussion-oriented site if the incentive is on encouraging people to say "I agree"?

>find another community without high standards for replies

I think you're generally right about post quality on HN, but don't confuse capricious voting culture with high standards. HN might have high standards, but you see it more in well thought-out replies which generate further discussion, than in the occasional greyed-out post which, in my experience, is usually a very poor indicator of the actual quality of the post. It's mostly a good indicator of what sort of person happened to read it first, and little else.

Almost anyone with a logged in account can upvote comments. There is a karma threshold to downvoting. Thus, an unfairly downvoted post is not a failure of the downvote system but a failure of everyone else to provide corrective upvotes.

I agree. Some of my personal rules are:

* Don't downvote gray comments, unless they are offensive or very offensive.

* Upvote very gray comments, even if I disagree or it is wrong or ... , unless it's very offensive.

This is a band-aid solution to a widely acknowledged problem.

But the entire concept of startup culture actively embraces the hive-mentality/cool-kids-know-best mindset so I doubt the actual problem will ever be fixed.

But sure, keep posting the same stockholm-esque defensive comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007027

> Strictly speaking a vote does affect someone's karma. But it doesn't cause their karma to be net decreased as a result of posting a comment unless you downvote the comment below 1, which most people don't do lightly. I think of the up and downvoting as a collaboration to determine how much additional karma someone should get for posting a new comment.

> This is a band-aid solution to a widely acknowledged problem.

It's an easy solution, and the only solution currently available. The fact it doesn't work just proves me right: the problem isn't just with people downvoting comments for disagreement; the problem involves other people not upvoting unfairly downvoted comments.

> The fact it doesn't work just proves me right

I didn't say your "solution" won't work, I said it's a bandaid.

Maybe it wasn't clear what I meant by "bandaid solution". Let me explain a literal example:

I once cut my knuckle very badly with a cheap mandolin slicer. I didn't realise at the time, but there was basically a chunk of my finger - about the size of a very large pea - missing, and because my knuckle was bent at the time it was deep. Because the blade was so ridiculously sharp, it wasn't really very painful, and due to the blood I couldn't see how deep it actually was, so I put a band-aid on it and didn't think about it.

Three days later a doctor had to use silver nitrate to cauterise the wound, as it immediately started bleeding profusely whenever the pressure from the bandaid was removed.

That is what I mean by "bandaid solution" - you're not solving the problem, merely covering up the issue and trying to ignore it.

Upvoting any and all non-offensive comments simply to counter any possible errant down votes defeats the purpose of having votes at all - I then have to choose between keeping the conversation open and honest, and "supporting" comments I actively agree with.

As a side-note, I strongly suggest against using a cheap mandolin OR having a wound cauterised with silver nitrate. I've had entire toenails removed, and part of the nailbed scraped away (it's as horrible as it sounds) as a child, and that hurt less than the cauterisation.

Slashdot was/is good in this regard. You don't upvote and downvote, you give a reason, like "Interesting", "Troll", "Offtopic", "Funny".

Slashdot had (it's pretty dead now, I guess) meta-moderation, which worked very well. I.e. you could vote on whether a particular rating and reason were appropriate in your opinion or not (with my 4-figure user-ID I often got 15 meta-moderation points to "spend" this way).

You are showing your age when reminiscing about having a 4 digit slashdot ID :)

"Flashing" your age ;)

Funny is a +1 on Slashdot, while on HN it'd be a -1.

Agreed. And that more than anything else about HN bothers me. I like intelligent humor. (Stupid humor however deserves to be down voted).

I like downvoted comments. I always pick up a couple of them when reading the comments to get a view of the people who think outside the norm. Sometimes they are genuinely stupid, but sometimes you get very interesting remarks on things which the "established norm" dislikes.

Sometimes the established norm is pretty far from the HN norm, too. It's an interesting way to learn about the (more active) users here. Not a rigorous or a scientific way, of course.

This is something very similar to the Seniority in government system.

The one who been there longer has more power, even they do not have brilliant idea nor ability to perform.

I don't have issues with the vote system. I always understand why users up/downvote me and they usually describe at great length their point of view.

On the other hand, Reddit has an awful downvote culture.

For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9526798 I stand by my point, but I can see why a few users thought of my comment as inappropriate.

I have never been baffled by a down vote. I've been surprised that something was downvoted. When I am surprised, I try to figure out why and what contributed to it that was in my control and what wasn't.

Usually, I get downvoted for xkcd 360 style wrestling the pig in mud. Sometimes I'm just factually wrong. Sometimes I'm just being a mean or stupid or just expressing a binary opinion...though those are less and less common, I think.

The long term solution has been trying to improve my writing, so that it better communicates my intent. The work of figuring out the reason for Downvotes is a feature not a bug...the exercise [literally and metaphorically] makes my writing stronger.

As for new users, I think The current system is useful for HN as a business unit. HN is part of YC. It's helpful to its selection process. Karma is a bit of a proxy for product market fit. Upvotes and Downvotes and novotes signal the reaction to some offering, taking risk and analyzing rewards and adjusting to feedback are all valuable habits, and if a down vote is going to wreck a person's day, a VC not returning your calls regarding the previously mentioned offer sheet as the startup burns through its last bag of ramen may not be the right career move.

The long play requires persistence and pivoting and perspective.

You want to censor yourself based on down vote reasons?

Even if sometimes it seems strange to receive a down vote there are many people with different opinions and even if they told you the reason it won't help you much, other than entering a time consuming debate I don't see what else you can do.

https://xkcd.com/386/

Down votes increased because hn got bigger, and it only means someone disagrees with you, why do you see it as a punishment?

> Down votes increased because hn got bigger, and it only means someone disagrees with you, why do you see it as a punishment?

And I thought disagreement was the worst reason for downvoting. I thought that you should downvote comments for low quality, when they add nothing but flame potential to the discussion.

Downvotes let a comment fade to grey until it is invisible. Is it so hard to see why someone would see this as punishment?

Why would I want to make counter-arguments vanish? A discussion where all visible comments promote the same opinion would be a boring, useless discussion. Actually, I tend to upvote opinions that I reject if they are outlined in a valuable manner. It is in my best interest to know the best points for all sides.

And OP, as I understand it, wants to make this more visible to downvoters: that disagreement isn't actually in the canonical list of downvote reasons.

As a long-time HN user I completely agree with you, but it's worth mentioning that pg specifically stated that it's perfectly fine to use downvotes for disagreement (if I find the comment where he said that I'll edit my post and put a link to it). So, while I don't think that downvotes should be used for disagreement, if the person that created this site says that it's ok, then I guess it's ok.

EDIT: Ah, here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

When downvoted comments are no longer greyed out and pushed out of the discussion maybe we agree that they are not a punishment.

The problem is that at present they are a bully pulpit. I have had comments that went negative days after they had been upvoted - surely if the comments were so bad they would have been downvoted right away?

> When downvoted comments are no longer greyed out and pushed out of the discussion maybe we agree that they are not a punishment.

Also: get greyed out often enough and end up [dead]. I understand why this is (continuously disruptive trolls etc.); It's just that it can also be "voice an unpopular opinion often enough".

I think probably not a good idea.

I don't particularly enjoy being down voted but it is interesting to try to figure out why a comment was down voted.

In real life, our friends might not tell us if, for example, our little political rant is boring. We do get that feedback on HN.

One thing that really irritates me however is when someone takes the time to respond to one of my comments and gets down voted. For me a big motivation for commenting is to see what responses I get. So, I like the current system, but perhaps down voting is overly used.

It doesn't matter. A downvote is not a personal affront, and you should certainly not ask for an explanation every time. Most are just noise and tend to even out after a while.

YMMV, but my impression is that downvotes are usually obvious and expected, either bad style/inflammatory or unpopular opinions in the given context (i.e. any criticism of e.g. Perl in a Perl-related discussion where many fans of the language are present).

Requiring a comment is probably less effort than all the captchas I have to solve because of Tor (many more than the number of downvotes I pass around...), but it'll lead to unnecessary meta-discussions ("he downvoted me because of foo but he's wrong because ...").

> all the captchas I have to solve because of Tor

Do you see those when posting from your current account? If so, I'm not sure we have this right. There are hurdles on new accounts to impede spammers and trolls, but we don't mean to make things harder for established users.

If you wouldn't mind, sending details of what you're experiencing to hn@ycombinator.com would be helpful. We'll look into it and maybe adjust how this works.

> Do you see those when posting from your current account?

Yes, I do reload HN quite often (always logged in with this account) and believe I have seen 5+ captchas or so today already.

Thanks for the offer to report details, I'll try to keep track of what exactly happens tomorrow.

Cool. A screenshot would be great, if that's convenient.

Sorry we've been inconveniencing you!

I completely agree, but I feel it should be mandatory. (I've proposed this same "explain why" mechanism for downvotes a few times in the past.)

Currently downvoting has unbalanced incentives. You need a fairly high level of karma to use the feature, which suggests that it's considered a privilege. Yet, once you have it, there's no responsibility attached to the privilege.

This can make downvoting kind of sophomoric: "I was unreasonably downvoted when I was a newbie, now it's payback time!"

You're assuming that HN isn't keeping track of how often you downvote (or any patterns). Without knowing the set up, it's difficult to infer much. Of course, revealing that info might lead to gaming the system.

Usually the reason why posts are being downvoted are pretty clear. But, those aren't always good reasons, because we're dealing with a group of people who have a very strong tendency to be know-it-alls (myself certainly not excepted). The vast bulk of my downvotes so far came from a thread where I pointed out a few obvious flaws (massive civil and potentially criminal liability) with the prevailing conspiracy theory about how the leaked Game of Thrones episodes were leaked by HBO themselves, as part of their secret plan to get people not to use HBO Go. I'm not especially bitter about it, but I do find myself self-censoring more often to avoid arguing with groupthink.

While the idea of "downvote requires a posted reason" is no doubt the best idea, if it proves too radical a change from a technical or behavioral reason, at least radically raise the karma need to downvote. Say so that only the top K number of accounts by age or karma can do so where K is _not_ a percentage. Because honestly the number of down-voting-for-poorly-thought-out-postings is now mightily outweighed by down-voting-becuse-I-dont-agree.

So much so that to be honest I now take downvotes as a badge of honor ironically.

I currently have 27800 karma. What makes you think I'm not an idiot with the downvote button?

Subjectively the problem seemed less bad in the past so I'm thinking that limiting to the donwvote permissions to longer term users will reduce the problem.

Very obviously requiring comments for downvotes is better.

I was just thinking about this the other day. I think it'd be useful if you could specify DH{0,1,2} as reasons for downvoting (http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html), as these are essentially useless comments that add nothing to the discussion.

It could be nice to have a popup menu where you can choose from the main reasons why a comment can be downvoted according to the rules, pointing to the relative FAQ entry. "Ad hominem" "Off topic" "Spammy" - this would help the newcomers and would probably be used more than having to type a reason.

When I started participating on HN, the general consensus for downvoting was for posts that were off-topic, poorly written, trollish, vile, etc. Never downvote to disagree.

Disagree by writing a thoughtful, reasoned response. Dissect the points that matter, ask for clarification, provide your own clarification.

People were having this conversation before you joined HN under this account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658683#up_658691

Why not leave the reason as a comment instead? I don't really see a need for a new feature.

If someone upvotes your negative comment, the complete thread goes up a bit. Thats the opposite, that your want with a downvote.

What you're describing isn't clear. I assume you meant to say "If someone comments on your negative comment ..." otherwise it appears you're describing how upvotes are generally expected to work.

I expect HNs algos could spot such a comment thread quite easily (thereby avoiding what you've described). That doesn't require a new user feature.

That could be solved by "if user has downvoted the comment they reply to, don't count upvotes for their reply when calculating thread value".

the options are:

i) Just downvote a comment that you think should not be on HN but which is not bad enough to flag

ii) Get involved in a tedious sub-thread bit of bickering with the comment's author about why you think they're wrong

iii) Write a post explaining why you think they're wrong, and have them reply with clarification, and you both end up agreeing and happy.

iii rarely happens. ii happens too often, and i is preferable to ii.

Isn't "not" upvoting same as "downvoting"?

I mean on HN the frequency of people who click on a link, if not at all worth would be less than 50-60.

Not sure how the HN algorithm works but am pretty sure it does well.

No, you don't really want to know why you are getting downvoted. Every time I got an explanation on Reddit it was annoying and more aggravating than just some stupid downvotes.

I don't think the problem is with down votes per se, but in the total balance of votes. It doesn't matter if you receive 100 negative votes if you received 1000 positive votes. It doesn't matter if you received 1000 positive votes if you received 10000 negative votes.

The question is if there are special biases for voters, like if almost nobody logs in to up vote, but people will log in to down vote. That will make some people feel like the site is capriciously punishing.

I find the often-preachy-and-self-absorbed explanations of why someone was downvoted really obnoxious. People here aren't stupid, we usually have a pretty good idea of when we're saying something controversial and/or why someone might downvote it. And some of the explanations I've seen, just wow... Explaining to someone that saying "thanks" is meaningless and adds nothing to the discussion is just a slap in the face.

I'd love to know why a few of my comments have been few voted lately, for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9517067 - which wasn't wrong!

Or this one, on systemd: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951637

That would be really nice. It could prevent accidental downvotes, when implemented in a certain way.

If you are a net positive contributor to HN, then the one or two negative votes a week from negative people should not outweigh the positive votes from everyone else. Don't be fixated on the raw value.

I agree. Many a times the link is duplicate and people downvote, but the OP gets no indication. In fact, when for a link I request people to add reason for flagging a post, my comment is downvoted.

I think we need a flag link for comments.

- You down-vote a wrong citation, false truth, someone who is flaming...

- You flag spammy links and such.

On the other hand, maybe we should increase the threshold for

- down-votes to 1,000 or 5,000

- flagging to 100 or 500

There is a flag link for comments. Click on a comment's timestamp to go to its item page, and (assuming you have a small amount of karma, I think 30) you'll see it.

Then I don't have it?

You should. If you don't see it, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll help you out.

One thing, though, is that you can't flag a direct reply to your own comment. Same rule as for downvotes.

Personally, I don't down vote - I only up vote articles/comments that are worth reading.

https://lobste.rs/

This is a good idea, but I would go one step further - giving a reason should be required for downvoting, but not for upvoting. Praise is always more effective communication than criticism. Especially as more members join this community steps must be made to prevent the toxic downvote-to-express-kneejerk-disagreement culture that pervades Reddit.

Hackernews is a great community in spite of the horrible mess that is the HN app. There is no reason that the HN codebase isn't open sourced and built by and for the community.

> There is no reason that the HN codebase isn't open sourced

I think mods mentioned some pretty aggressive voting rings (from surprising, disappointing, places. The Atlantic did this. I stopped posting any links from them when I found out.) But there is a lot of vote ringing on HN.

Would being open source affect vote ring detection?

Is this really a problem that needs a solution?

Years back down-votes were rare on HN. It was relatively easy to infer why a comment was down-voted. Now you mostly can't tell, just wonder why.

Looking at the greyed out comments on this post, I think it's fairly obvious why they've been downvoted.

No they weren't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057275

Brushfire says, 1946 days ago:

> I agree - Thanks for acknowledging it.

> I've seen a lot more down voting of well-reasoned comments and arguments just because of disagreement, and I've seen a lot more snide, unhelpful, almost belligerent comments across the board.

> I cant speak for others, but its good to know you are working on it, as I dont want to find another place.

I remember that. I've been here longer. It has been a long down-slope.

hackernews.stackexchange.com

Be carefull, onliners are usually dowvoted here. (I usually donwvote dummy oneliners, but I didn't downvote this.) (Luckily your comment is black again.)

I guess I agree with you, but I' difficult to know without a longer explanation. I'll write my longer explanation:

If HN does this, it will look like http://hackernews.stackexchange.com .When I visit stackoverflow, I notice that there are many comments just to explain upvotes and downvotes. I think that it adds too much noise and moderation to the discussion. I prefer the HN style, were the meta discussion is as small as possible, so it's easier to follow the main discussion.

>Punishment without reason in real life is known as wickedness, cruelty, bullying...

I had some issue with this point. Getting a downvote might sting a little bit, but to equate it to getting bullied is taking it too far. I got bullied plenty growing up (as I'm sure many other people here have) and to equate a meaningless downvote - someone disagreeing with you - with something as traumatizing as being bullied is insulting.

Someone disagreeing with your opinion is nowhere near the same as being bullied, or being oppressed. I've experienced cruelty directed at me. It's nothing like a semi anonymous person on the internet pressing a button.

I don't think he was equating the two. Just comparing them.

Many of us have experienced cruelty. That doesn't mean anything less severe than what we've experienced is not cruel (although I wouldn't describe getting downvoted without reason to be cruel I understand where OP is coming from).

If he wasn't equating the two, he wouldn't have put them in the same post lie that. No, technically he didn't say it out loud, but that was the intention of the proximity.

My idea: charge karma for a downvote: 1 down vote = lose one karma point UNLESS they reply to the person they downvoted.

Notes won't change anything. There's a culture of comment suppression here that goes all the way up. If you've been downvoted it means that you failed to match somebody's expectation of what you should be writing. Now you're toxic and you need to be punished for the common good. Be glad you weren't also hellbanned. Yet.

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