15 ms·

Ask PG: What have I done wrong?

tl;dr: Now my votes are broken, and I'm sad. (edited: "dl;dr" -> "tl;dr" - sorry.) ================ I've seen this complaint made several times before, with people finding that their votes are apparently not having any effect. I've watched the discussions, not feeling I have anything to contribute, wondering what they may have done to trigger the secretive "vote-ignoring" logic that you tinker with. I understand that you need to stay on top of the problem of people gaming the system, and that being too open just makes it easier for people to screw around and make the voting system less valuable. But generally I rely on high-quality items bubbling to the top, so when I see a comment I think is valuable and yet which is low down in the pecking order, I upvote it. I take care, I try to add value, I invest time. And now I've found that some of my recent votes haven't made a difference. The comments I thought were worth boosting continue to languish. The people I thought were worth rewarding haven't got the karma. I've wasted my time trying to make the site more valuable. So, while I'll continue to believe that things are partially random, but biased to having better stuff near the top, I'm no longer as confident as I was. I'll continue to scan the new submissions to see if there's anything interesting, and maybe I'll click on an up arrow, but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add value. The message is that my time isn't valued. You've encouraged me into taking without giving back. You've encouraged me to react without thinking. If that's the message you intended, I think that's sad. Here are two links to earlier discussions - there are more. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233460

garply 17y ago
While we're talking about the voting system - could you please specify more clearly in the guidelines in what circumstances downmodding is appropriate?
- logicalmind 17y ago
  One example of downmodding that I've seen personally is that someone will post a reference of a link or a book that I had never heard about. When it is particularly valuable to me I like to respond thanking them for posting it. I don't expect karma from this, I simply want to convey my thanks to the person who provided the information and to encourage other people to do the same. I also upvote them, but I think the personal thanks is more valuable. I've had these "that you" comments downvoted consistently, to the point where I no longer thank people and ultimately delete the comment. I find this behavior strange in a "community".
  - allenbrunson 17y ago
    what you're describing there is a pretty information-free response, not terribly different from just saying 'me too'. that's what upvotes are for.
    - logicalmind 17y ago
      I see your point, but I don't believe we have the same definition of "information-free". Unless I'm mistaken, upvotes are anonymous. A comment of "thank you" or appreciation is essentially a publicly identifiable upvote. The information being conveyed is to the commenter and that information is the appreciation of the comment from an identifiable individual. In just about every situation you could say that greetings, salutations, etc. convey no obvious information. But I'm not sure how far we'd get without them. I personally believe that things like this are what maintain and bond a community. But that is simply my opinion. I'd take a thoughtful comment reply, even if in disagreement, than an upvote any day.
Quarrelsome 17y ago
Is it not safer to assume it is a bug first of all before claiming that pg is wasting your time and not valuing you?
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Often yes, but in this case probably not. PG has stated publically that he tinkers with whether or not to count votes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871458 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871458 It appears that in this case, as in others before mine, he's decided that he's not going to count my votes. I have no idea why. As I say, it makes me inclined not to bother giving much back to the site, even though it's a great resource.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - lutorm 17y ago
    No, that thread states that he tinkers with "changes to the code that decides which votes count". I don't see why you would jump to the conclusion that it's intentional and not a bug when he's publicly said he's experimenting.
    - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
      False positives in complex code designed to detect behaviour are not bugs. I'm not saying I've been singled out and that some editor has said - Ooh, that RiderOfGiraffes, we need to remove voting privileges. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that as a result of the system they have, I've lost my voting privileges, and I think it's a false positive. And I'm asking - what have I done to trigger the mechanism? I doubt I'll get an answer, no one else ever seems to have, and given that the site seems largely to work pretty well, I'm not going to campaign actively for it to be run differently. But I'm not the only one, and I'm disappointed that despite trying to stay within the guidelines, despite submitting stuff I think the community will find interesting, and despite thinking carefully about how I vote and why I vote, somehow I've fallen foul of the system. Sufficiently disappointed that I don't think I'll take so much care in the future.
cmars232 17y ago
Look at it like voting in America. Yeah, it probably doesn't mean squat, especially if your views contradict the local majority. But you still do it, right?
- randallsquared 17y ago
  No.
  - Quarrelsome 17y ago
    I think the root here was complaining about the "First Past the Post System". In that case he has a point, especially when our politicians enjoy engaging in "jerrymandering".
revorad 17y ago
Chill out man. First, it could be a bug. Second, no doubt HN is a special place, but it's still just a news forum. Get back to work, go out to play, don't make this your life. </patronising>
- davi 17y ago
  I know what you mean but HN has also been a place where like-minded people could identify one another for possible real world collaboration. That's much more than just a news forum.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  First of all, yes, I am fully aware that this is just a news forum, and that there's this thing called "real life." Secondly, this is a great resource of both contacts and information. It's made great because of the quality of people here, and the time they take to submit, comment, and vote. Without that time from people with busy lives, HN will become rather non-special. I'm pointing out that at least one person here now feels, because of a stated policy, that their time is undervalued, so I'm thinking of taking it elsewhere. I do have an outside life, I was investing time here because I thought it might be valued. I'm re-evaluating that decision I'm not going to walk away without explanation. When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why. I'm giving PG the courtesy to let him know my reactions to his policies. It's his site and he can and will do as he chooses. So far he's done an extraordinary job. Think of this as customer feedback.
  - plinkplonk 17y ago
    Fwiw I think people who downvote you are reacting to the tone of your writing Sentences like "I'm not going to walk away without explanation." sound (mildly) pompous and priggish. You could cut all the dramatics and posturing from your post, state the facts (as you see them) plainly, provide any supporting data and ask a polite question about the effect you want and what you can do to help. Sentences like "When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why." and "Think of this as customer feedback." have an assumption built in which may not hold. "user" != "customer".
ntoshev 17y ago
Try Ctrl-F5 on pages where it seems your vote doesn't count. It's most likely stale cache.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Been there, done that, run experiments, and no, it's not a cacheing issue. This has been raised before, and it's not a bug. PG has explicitly said he experiments with not counting some votes. It appears he's decided (perhaps temporarily) not to count mine. Hence the question.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
> I understand that you need to stay on top of the problem of people gaming the system, and that being too open just makes it easier for people to screw around and make the voting system less valuable. Is security through obscurity really a good idea in this day and age?
- romland 17y ago
  Works for Google and their pagerank. And I would argue that in that case it IS a good idea. :)
- wizard_2 17y ago
  Its another brick in the wall. As long as you're not fooling yourself into thinking it's all you need, it aids in not making things easier for people to figure out and slightly raises the bar against intrusion. "Defense in Depth" is the only situation where I could consider obscurity a security layer. Just because I keep my ssh servers up to date (disable passwords, root login, etc), doesn't mean I don't gain anything by having them listen a high port. The moment a 0-Day exploit is found (or maybe another Debian key generation bug) the security of not showing up on every script kiddies initial scans looking for unpatched ssh servers is worth something.
Slashed 17y ago
The same here. I had started a topic on this before and some people assured me that it will probably get back working, as they had this issue before as well. Personally, I don't care much about this. Though when I start a topic here asking for help, I feel that I should thank those who helped me by upvoting their comments.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I've got a better one for you: I submitted an article yesterday. Quickly 3 or 4 people upvoted it -- it was basically an "Ask HN" piece. Nothing special. But the odd thing was that even though the score increased dramatically from 1 to 5 in just 10-15 minutes, the ranking didn't change that much. Used to be that an increase of that much would get you near the top of the front page, if even for a little bit. I'm not complaining, just figured somebody somewhere was tinkering or it was some kind of effect of karma inflation. However it does bring up an interesting point about UI design and large groups of users -- any non-obvious new system behavior can easily be interpreted in lots of ways, some of which aren't so flattering to the board owners. FWIW, I've always thought this behavior was a bug. If I thought my vote was being taken and then returned to me at random times depending on the "smarts" of the system without notifying me why, I'd be pretty mad. I understand that it's already happening with deep threads and the first time I stumbled across it I was so mad I was ready to just throw in the towel on HN. Not exactly a happy user experience, but yes, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Just a better job of communicating would salve a lot of these hurt feelings, in my opinion.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Apparently submissions with text as opposed to URLs don't get ranked as highly. Two items submitted at the same time and with the same votes, one with URL, the other as text, the text one will rank significantly lower. That might explain your observation.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    Thanks! But that's my point -- there's all kinds of little nuances and "if X, then Y" in the system and hell if I have time to keep on top of all of it. To my mind, it seems a reasonable assumption that there is a mad sysadmin somewhere just screwing around with me. After all, in the past for most boards limiting voting or tweaking ranking or turning on or off features was traditionally handled by a person, not an algorithm. Maybe it's some super-duper cool collaborative voting checker that's working wrong or maybe somebody just had a bad day. As a user, beats me -- and once I have to start second-guessing who is doing what to me and why the site is totally screwed. In my opinion. You shouldn't have to be on HN everyday and read all the pages to understand how the site works. That's an idiotic expectation. By the way, I'm commenting on all user sites with non-intuitive behavior, not just the peculiarities of HN.
numbchuckskills 17y ago
This is a good example of the power of a karma or rating system on your website. Personally, I don't give a shit if I'm being rewarded (or penalized) on websites, and seeing a little number next to my screen name doesn't give me any sense of pride or validation. With this little rant about feeling like they're 'wasting time' because a counter isn't being incremented with an arbitrary points system, it's obvious there's at least some people out there that absolutely need this add-on to contribute positively.
pclark 17y ago
I can't believe you made a new submission about this. Seriously. Why can't you email him? I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant. Seriously. It's just the internet.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  > Why can't you email him? That would probably be impolite :) > I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant Please read Riders explanation. There are automatic triggers which stop your votes counting for an unknown period of time if you trigger them. Not a conspiracy; requests for information on this have been posted a couple of times before.
  - pclark 17y ago
    It'd be impolite to email someone something when it only concerns them, and yet it's fine to post on an online news group where everyone will see it?
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      What emailing out of the blue on a low priority issue and for which a wider group of people are interested in the answer anyway? I certainly wouldn't bother him.
      - scott_s 17y ago
        There is a history at HN of people who encountered problems emailing PG and having the problem solved.
    - axod 17y ago
      Something is clearly broken, or not working properly. And affecting many HN users. I think it was worth the post.
andrew1 17y ago
If you haven't done so already, why don't you email Paul Graham privately and ask him what you have done to cause your comments to be discounted. If it is for a reason that he wants to keep private then it might be more constructive than raising the issue in public.
- Tichy 17y ago
  Not that I disagree, however, I found it interesting to hear about this issue. I wasn't aware it exists before this submission.
ErrantX 17y ago
I've had my voting stopped on a couple of occasions. The last one was because I downvoted someone 3-4 times in a row in the same thread (all their comments needed a downvote :) it wasn't anything nasty) and my voting stopped working for a week or so. I also think in the past I have had it removed for: - upvoting different stories in quick succession (came back to the page to vote stories I liked....) - downvoting the same person 2-3 times in the space of about 20 minutes in different threads (without realising I must stress!) with no other votes in between It comes back after X amount of time. > but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add value. Yeh I feel that; I read now but dont bother to contribute many votes.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  from pg's comments elsewhere my thoughts on what behaviour limits your voting might be incorrect - simply circumstances of coincidence (and more related to volume of posting_
zachbeane 17y ago
My guess is you got flagged by possible-sockpuppet. See news.arc in arc3.tar for why some stuff gets ignored. (def possible-sockpuppet (user) (or (ignored user) (< (uvar user weight) .5) (and (< (user-age user) new-age-threshold*) (< (karma user) new-karma-threshold*)))) Since your age and karma don't seem to be a problem, I'd guess an admin or editor marked you as ignored, or an admin reduced your weight.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Interesting - thanks. I wish I could upvote you.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  No, that isn't it, RoG is well above those thresholds.
idlewords 17y ago
I think what it boils down to is that the devoting logic is easy to trigger and permanent. I haven't had the ability to up or downvote in about six months.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  I've not heard of the automatic bans lasting that long??? The longest I ever had was about 2 months (give or take - I was away for part of it). The longest ever someone has mentioned to me has been about 3 1/2 months
  - idlewords 17y ago
    Then I am your new record! Just checked it and it happily fails.
thirdusername 17y ago
It's the same for me and has been like that for weeks, months(?). Having your votes on hacker news isn't exactly important to life as others have pointed out but it's slightly demoralizing whenever I forget myself and vote on something only to realize the system just ignores me. I'm useless and valued less than even a new user. :( I'm considering creating a new user because of that as I've tried to just wait for it to work again hoping it's temporary. I have no idea what caused me to loose my voting rights in the first place and there's no way for me to change my behavior if it's undesirable. I've for the record never voted maliciously and this is my username because I've lost my password twice before not because I have several users to vote with.
bioweek 17y ago
What does dl;dr: mean? I couldn't find it in the urban dictionary.
- lt 17y ago
  Not sure if you are sarcastic, but I'm pretty sure he meant tl; dr http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    Yes - thanks - now corrected.
  - ektimo 17y ago
    For some browsers you will need to use: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
icey 17y ago
I know this may not be the same situation as yours, and it may not be entirely helpful to you; but whenever I've had a problem with my account I've just sent a note to PG and it's gotten taken care of within a day or so. (I have had voting problems previously.)
wensing 17y ago
I had no idea HN's defense mechanisms were this sophisticated.
thaumaturgy 17y ago
Considering that pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a short list of people whose comments he tends to find interesting, I doubt this was intentional. It also might've been better handled by a short email to him.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  > pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a > short list of people whose comments he tends to > find interesting ... Really? I didn't know. Do you have a reference? > It also might've been better handled by a short > email to him. To be honest, I never actually thought of that.
  - thaumaturgy 17y ago
    I thought it was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845938 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845938 ...but it's not. Might've been somewhere else, or I might be mistaken.
    - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
      That's the reference I found, and I found no others. Never mind, it was a nice thought while it lasted. 8-)
yes_its_giles 17y ago
Just create a new account. I get banned all the time. This is my third account. You can't take it personally. It's either some person being wrong about you or some automated system. Who cares? I love it when I get banned, it means I won't be back for a while, until the desire for attention overcomes the inertia. This site is kinda like Get Satisfaction for bloggers. "You don't have to create an account. It's just that everybody on this one thread is talking about you right now, and they're all taking your lack of response to mean something." I hate the karma system. Any site that has one is fundamentally flawed (detailed rant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...). It's an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship, and I hate to kick somebody when they're down, but this guy, with all his sad whining about "I don't know what I did wrong, why don't you love me any more"? That is not the sign of a healthy community. That is the sign of an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship. Any venture capitalist knows that you run a lot of experiments and some things fail. The karma system is fail. Throw it away. PS, please ban me.
- yes_its_giles 17y ago
  PPS, nothing against you, giraffes guy, I just re-read my sentence and it seemed a bit harsh. I'm just saying that a web site that makes a person unhappy is not a good thing for them to be part of, and as someone who comes back repeatedly, despite being banned, to me it looks as if your desire to come back, despite being disenfranchised, is a sure sign of dysfunction. my coming back is certainly dysfunctional, but here I am. people dig the site in spite of its dysfunctions, but it sure would be cool if PG et al just threw the dysfunctional parts away.
- mcantelon 17y ago
  There is no shortage of karma-free forums elsewhere full of flames and junk. The karma system is helpful in providing feedback to people with a lack of impulse control or respects for others. If you're repeatedly banned, you may want to examine how you communicate as doing so would probably increase your ability to affect change.
  - 17y ago
allenbrunson 17y ago
Okay, so this topic comes up pretty frequently, so I'm going to go at it again. I, for one, completely support what pg is doing. The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake. It's to keep conversation at the absolute highest possible quality. To that end, pg and and the editors curb a lot of behavior they find contrary to that goal. They kill spam. They kill articles that are too far away from our core topics. They ban trolls. They ban people who aren't quite trolls, but still have a negative effect on conversation. At the low end of the penalty scale, they sometimes take away your voting privileges, for awhile, or potentially forever. I'm guessing that means: we like what you have to say just fine, but we think your voting patterns are harming the site. I've noticed this happening to a lot of people, so I've used that feedback to modify my own behavior. I try to make about four or five comment upvotes for every downvote, at least. I don't downvote anything into negative points unless I think it is really harsh and goes very much against the grain. The details don't matter, but the overall outcome does: I try to behave in a manner that I think is good for the site. If it turns out that pg disagrees with what I'm doing, I'm perfectly fine with that. If he takes away my voting rights or bans me outright, I will still think he's doing a good job. Here's why I think so: just look at this place! Have you ever seen an internet hangout that got this old and/or this big, yet remained as civil and valuable as this one? I certainly haven't. That says to me that pg isn't just doing something right, he's doing something incredibly right. I am frankly a lot less impressed by the community-building track record of any of the complainers.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Largely speaking I agree with you. My problem here is that I don't know what I've done wrong. If those responsible (PG and his editors) want to communicate a message to me, they've failed. I haven't gone around upvoting and downvoting excessively. I've upvoted a few things I think are of value, and I don't remember downvoting anything recently. I'm just confused. Feedback works best when it's consistent in direction (but not in frequency) and clearly attached to the action that provoked it. I think PG and friends do a great job on this. I think this is something they get wrong.
  - deleted 17y ago
pg 17y ago
A few months ago, because of the mob feel that voting was starting to have now that the site has grown so big, I started experimenting with thresholds for which votes got counted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202). The best test I could think of was the average score of a user's recent comments, so I used that. Currently the threshold is 2. The reason your votes stopped counting is that you dropped just below that. Your average is currently 1.88. (Ironically, it's much higher now because of the comments on this thread, but comment averages are calculated asynchronously, so there will be a lag before yours is recalculated.) I'm probably going to do away with the display of point totals on comments entirely, because thresholds haven't fixed the problem. In that case I'll just use points internally, e.g. to sort threads, and then I'll probably go back to counting most votes. Edit: Since I was planning to toss the threshold when I stopped displaying comment scores, I just reset it to 1. Also, since users asked to see their avg comment scores in their profile pages, I just added that.
- psranga 17y ago
  Thanks for the response and your hard work to build up and sustain a great community! Have you thought about hiding the submitter's and commenter's name for an hour (or twelve :)) after the post is submitted? Won't that solve the problem of mob voting?
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  Doesn't that actually encourage more mob voting, as only people who the majority vote up are allowed to vote up? It seems like it would be a self-reinforcing mechanism, with people who often take unpopular stances unable to participate in determining what comments and stories get the most votes?
  - pg 17y ago
    I didn't mean mob in the sense of groupthink, but in the sense of a volatile, easily swayed mass. The situation I'm worried is the one where voters end up being like a crowd egging on two people who are fighting.
tokenadult 17y ago
Thanks to everyone for their interesting comments. Some of the forms of site behavior mentioned here I don't think I have ever observed. I don't read the code for the site software, so I just use the site empirically. The discussion of trade-offs involved in different kinds of site voting behavior defaults has been very helpful to me. My overall perspective on any online forum's forum rules is that I just deal with them. I don't take any set of rules personally. I don't assume any kind of enforcement action or limitation on my own forum participation is directed at me as an individual, but rather is a forum management response to forum issues. If I enjoy a forum, I keep right on participating. If I don't enjoy a forum, I take my participation elsewhere without feeling offended. I happen to like HN a lot. To each their own. As to specific observations of voting behavior, to the best of my knowledge and belief, when I upvote a comment or submission, and when I downvote a comment, my votes immediately change the score of the item I have just voted on. I try in my own mind to upvote more often than downvote, but I have no way to keep track of my actual count of votes up or down. I do like to clean up the comments, so I definitely downvote from time to time, and sometimes in bursts of downvotes in one thread. Unless I am wholly mistaken in my observation, my votes count as ups or downs on those items, in real time. It has been my observation that my own personal karma score will sometimes be stable for hours at a time, even if I have made new comments or submitted new articles, and it may be (I don't know) that I am running into some automated response of the site software such that my karma score is frozen if I have just been downvoting repeatedly. But it often seems that overnight, or after a while, my personal karma score becomes unstuck, and anyway I don't worry about this too much. I look at my threads view from time to time both to see if anyone has replied to any of my comments and to see what the aggregate votes are on those comments. If I am below 1 in aggregate score on some comment I have made, I try to think why readers would decide to downvote it. If I see someone else get a conspicuously high net score on a comment in a thread where I have also commented, I try to figure out what he or she did right to achieve commendation from other participants. As long as the site in general is worth reading and interesting to me, I don't especially worry about how its voting behavior is implemented. It's fun for me to learn from other participants here what kind of rules are visible in the source code and what kind of incentives may be designed by management to keep the conversation worthwhile. Since 1992, I have been a moderator on one or another of a variety of online forums, and I'm always deeply curious about what makes online communities successful and valuable to participants. I think HN is doing a good job. P.S. I like many of RiderOfGiraffes's submissions and comments, and have certainly upvoted more than a few (and perhaps downvoted none of them). I too recall some thread in which pg mentioned RiderOfGiraffes favorably, although I don't have the link at hand. I would regret seeing RiderOfGiraffes leaving the site or changing his username, because I like to see familiar usernames as a clue that a comment or submission will be worth a read.
elblanco 17y ago
I've noticed this same effect as well. I thought that it wasn't counted for some period of time + it wasn't counted unless there was a reply to the comment or some such.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
tmsh 17y ago
It's amazing how voting gets pretty complex, pretty fast. Although, these are more ballot-based, I remember reading about this in my discrete math class (in high school!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system I second a couple of people's comments about how it's very cool PG is constantly trying to improve the system. I've sometimes read his comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg), and one can tell he really cares about the level of discourse (even if he just writes, 'Please stop', etc.). The idea of preventing 'mob feel' reminds me of America's system of checks and balances. A democracy/republic with three branches of government is not a perfect system, but it's been sustainable. I don't know the right way to do voting, but I'd recommend pg and whoever else is involved in this discussion -- think about it in terms of time (i.e., too many processes running in similar time intervals can get out of hand -- exe, leg and s.ct. are all staggered in terms of their time horizons) and symmetry (i.e., balanced levels of power). Arguably, in a majority rule situation, the government's checks are in place primarily to protect minority rights (from mob rule). This seems a little different from the 'mob rule' problem being discussed (where people gravitate into two-sided arguments). But anyway, perhaps I'd try to figure out fractional voting. People with more karma (maybe 50% weighted by total karma and 50% weighted by karma velocity over the past couple of weeks) can upvote with maybe something like 1.5 the votes of everyone else. But if you ask me, everyone's downvote should be significantly less than 1. Though, there could be again a 50% total and 50% velocity function for how each user's posts and comments are treated. I.e, if a user starts posting really bad stuff, then they should be able to be voted down much more quickly. But arguably, this part of the system should be tinkered with much less. Everyone, theoretically, should have a right to say whatever want. Hmm, maybe they could be forwarded to the rules for discussion and be delayed from posting (like a Hockey penalty box?) I don't know. It's a complex issue. Maybe it's good enough the way it is. As this system moves forward though, it'd probably be smart to build in ways to vote/approve changes to the system. Not for everything, but big things (analog is the presidential election. People would probably feel a lot better about it all. It's strange. Maybe you need a Constitution too. Update. One last little idea. You could introduce new voting functionality perhaps as A-B tests. Some posts randomly get flagged for voting with feature X, some don't. If you could establish some metric to judge 'satisfaction' with the experience (more good karma in the discussion?), you could, basically, build 'learning' into your system.

garply 17y ago

While we're talking about the voting system - could you please specify more clearly in the guidelines in what circumstances downmodding is appropriate?

logicalmind 17y ago
One example of downmodding that I've seen personally is that someone will post a reference of a link or a book that I had never heard about. When it is particularly valuable to me I like to respond thanking them for posting it. I don't expect karma from this, I simply want to convey my thanks to the person who provided the information and to encourage other people to do the same. I also upvote them, but I think the personal thanks is more valuable. I've had these "that you" comments downvoted consistently, to the point where I no longer thank people and ultimately delete the comment. I find this behavior strange in a "community".
- allenbrunson 17y ago
  what you're describing there is a pretty information-free response, not terribly different from just saying 'me too'. that's what upvotes are for.
  - logicalmind 17y ago
    I see your point, but I don't believe we have the same definition of "information-free". Unless I'm mistaken, upvotes are anonymous. A comment of "thank you" or appreciation is essentially a publicly identifiable upvote. The information being conveyed is to the commenter and that information is the appreciation of the comment from an identifiable individual. In just about every situation you could say that greetings, salutations, etc. convey no obvious information. But I'm not sure how far we'd get without them. I personally believe that things like this are what maintain and bond a community. But that is simply my opinion. I'd take a thoughtful comment reply, even if in disagreement, than an upvote any day.

Quarrelsome 17y ago

Is it not safer to assume it is a bug first of all before claiming that pg is wasting your time and not valuing you?

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
Often yes, but in this case probably not. PG has stated publically that he tinkers with whether or not to count votes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871458 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871458 It appears that in this case, as in others before mine, he's decided that he's not going to count my votes. I have no idea why. As I say, it makes me inclined not to bother giving much back to the site, even though it's a great resource.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- lutorm 17y ago
  No, that thread states that he tinkers with "changes to the code that decides which votes count". I don't see why you would jump to the conclusion that it's intentional and not a bug when he's publicly said he's experimenting.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    False positives in complex code designed to detect behaviour are not bugs. I'm not saying I've been singled out and that some editor has said - Ooh, that RiderOfGiraffes, we need to remove voting privileges. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that as a result of the system they have, I've lost my voting privileges, and I think it's a false positive. And I'm asking - what have I done to trigger the mechanism? I doubt I'll get an answer, no one else ever seems to have, and given that the site seems largely to work pretty well, I'm not going to campaign actively for it to be run differently. But I'm not the only one, and I'm disappointed that despite trying to stay within the guidelines, despite submitting stuff I think the community will find interesting, and despite thinking carefully about how I vote and why I vote, somehow I've fallen foul of the system. Sufficiently disappointed that I don't think I'll take so much care in the future.

cmars232 17y ago

Look at it like voting in America. Yeah, it probably doesn't mean squat, especially if your views contradict the local majority. But you still do it, right?

randallsquared 17y ago
No.
- Quarrelsome 17y ago
  I think the root here was complaining about the "First Past the Post System". In that case he has a point, especially when our politicians enjoy engaging in "jerrymandering".

revorad 17y ago

Chill out man. First, it could be a bug. Second, no doubt HN is a special place, but it's still just a news forum. Get back to work, go out to play, don't make this your life. </patronising>

davi 17y ago
I know what you mean but HN has also been a place where like-minded people could identify one another for possible real world collaboration. That's much more than just a news forum.
RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
First of all, yes, I am fully aware that this is just a news forum, and that there's this thing called "real life." Secondly, this is a great resource of both contacts and information. It's made great because of the quality of people here, and the time they take to submit, comment, and vote. Without that time from people with busy lives, HN will become rather non-special. I'm pointing out that at least one person here now feels, because of a stated policy, that their time is undervalued, so I'm thinking of taking it elsewhere. I do have an outside life, I was investing time here because I thought it might be valued. I'm re-evaluating that decision I'm not going to walk away without explanation. When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why. I'm giving PG the courtesy to let him know my reactions to his policies. It's his site and he can and will do as he chooses. So far he's done an extraordinary job. Think of this as customer feedback.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  Fwiw I think people who downvote you are reacting to the tone of your writing Sentences like "I'm not going to walk away without explanation." sound (mildly) pompous and priggish. You could cut all the dramatics and posturing from your post, state the facts (as you see them) plainly, provide any supporting data and ask a polite question about the effect you want and what you can do to help. Sentences like "When people stop being my customers I'd like to know why." and "Think of this as customer feedback." have an assumption built in which may not hold. "user" != "customer".

ntoshev 17y ago

Try Ctrl-F5 on pages where it seems your vote doesn't count. It's most likely stale cache.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
Been there, done that, run experiments, and no, it's not a cacheing issue. This has been raised before, and it's not a bug. PG has explicitly said he experiments with not counting some votes. It appears he's decided (perhaps temporarily) not to count mine. Hence the question.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago

> I understand that you need to stay on top of the problem of people gaming the system, and that being too open just makes it easier for people to screw around and make the voting system less valuable. Is security through obscurity really a good idea in this day and age?

romland 17y ago
Works for Google and their pagerank. And I would argue that in that case it IS a good idea. :)
wizard_2 17y ago
Its another brick in the wall. As long as you're not fooling yourself into thinking it's all you need, it aids in not making things easier for people to figure out and slightly raises the bar against intrusion. "Defense in Depth" is the only situation where I could consider obscurity a security layer. Just because I keep my ssh servers up to date (disable passwords, root login, etc), doesn't mean I don't gain anything by having them listen a high port. The moment a 0-Day exploit is found (or maybe another Debian key generation bug) the security of not showing up on every script kiddies initial scans looking for unpatched ssh servers is worth something.

Slashed 17y ago

The same here. I had started a topic on this before and some people assured me that it will probably get back working, as they had this issue before as well. Personally, I don't care much about this. Though when I start a topic here asking for help, I feel that I should thank those who helped me by upvoting their comments.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

I've got a better one for you: I submitted an article yesterday. Quickly 3 or 4 people upvoted it -- it was basically an "Ask HN" piece. Nothing special. But the odd thing was that even though the score increased dramatically from 1 to 5 in just 10-15 minutes, the ranking didn't change that much. Used to be that an increase of that much would get you near the top of the front page, if even for a little bit. I'm not complaining, just figured somebody somewhere was tinkering or it was some kind of effect of karma inflation. However it does bring up an interesting point about UI design and large groups of users -- any non-obvious new system behavior can easily be interpreted in lots of ways, some of which aren't so flattering to the board owners. FWIW, I've always thought this behavior was a bug. If I thought my vote was being taken and then returned to me at random times depending on the "smarts" of the system without notifying me why, I'd be pretty mad. I understand that it's already happening with deep threads and the first time I stumbled across it I was so mad I was ready to just throw in the towel on HN. Not exactly a happy user experience, but yes, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Just a better job of communicating would salve a lot of these hurt feelings, in my opinion.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
Apparently submissions with text as opposed to URLs don't get ranked as highly. Two items submitted at the same time and with the same votes, one with URL, the other as text, the text one will rank significantly lower. That might explain your observation.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  Thanks! But that's my point -- there's all kinds of little nuances and "if X, then Y" in the system and hell if I have time to keep on top of all of it. To my mind, it seems a reasonable assumption that there is a mad sysadmin somewhere just screwing around with me. After all, in the past for most boards limiting voting or tweaking ranking or turning on or off features was traditionally handled by a person, not an algorithm. Maybe it's some super-duper cool collaborative voting checker that's working wrong or maybe somebody just had a bad day. As a user, beats me -- and once I have to start second-guessing who is doing what to me and why the site is totally screwed. In my opinion. You shouldn't have to be on HN everyday and read all the pages to understand how the site works. That's an idiotic expectation. By the way, I'm commenting on all user sites with non-intuitive behavior, not just the peculiarities of HN.

numbchuckskills 17y ago

This is a good example of the power of a karma or rating system on your website. Personally, I don't give a shit if I'm being rewarded (or penalized) on websites, and seeing a little number next to my screen name doesn't give me any sense of pride or validation. With this little rant about feeling like they're 'wasting time' because a counter isn't being incremented with an arbitrary points system, it's obvious there's at least some people out there that absolutely need this add-on to contribute positively.

pclark 17y ago

I can't believe you made a new submission about this. Seriously. Why can't you email him? I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant. Seriously. It's just the internet.

ErrantX 17y ago
> Why can't you email him? That would probably be impolite :) > I can't believe you assume there is some kind of conspiracy to render your votes irrelevant Please read Riders explanation. There are automatic triggers which stop your votes counting for an unknown period of time if you trigger them. Not a conspiracy; requests for information on this have been posted a couple of times before.
- pclark 17y ago
  It'd be impolite to email someone something when it only concerns them, and yet it's fine to post on an online news group where everyone will see it?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    What emailing out of the blue on a low priority issue and for which a wider group of people are interested in the answer anyway? I certainly wouldn't bother him.
    - scott_s 17y ago
      There is a history at HN of people who encountered problems emailing PG and having the problem solved.
  - axod 17y ago
    Something is clearly broken, or not working properly. And affecting many HN users. I think it was worth the post.

andrew1 17y ago

If you haven't done so already, why don't you email Paul Graham privately and ask him what you have done to cause your comments to be discounted. If it is for a reason that he wants to keep private then it might be more constructive than raising the issue in public.

Tichy 17y ago
Not that I disagree, however, I found it interesting to hear about this issue. I wasn't aware it exists before this submission.

ErrantX 17y ago

I've had my voting stopped on a couple of occasions. The last one was because I downvoted someone 3-4 times in a row in the same thread (all their comments needed a downvote :) it wasn't anything nasty) and my voting stopped working for a week or so. I also think in the past I have had it removed for: - upvoting different stories in quick succession (came back to the page to vote stories I liked....) - downvoting the same person 2-3 times in the space of about 20 minutes in different threads (without realising I must stress!) with no other votes in between It comes back after X amount of time. > but I'm pretty disincentivized about bothering to spend time trying to add value. Yeh I feel that; I read now but dont bother to contribute many votes.

ErrantX 17y ago
from pg's comments elsewhere my thoughts on what behaviour limits your voting might be incorrect - simply circumstances of coincidence (and more related to volume of posting_

zachbeane 17y ago

My guess is you got flagged by possible-sockpuppet. See news.arc in arc3.tar for why some stuff gets ignored. (def possible-sockpuppet (user) (or (ignored user) (< (uvar user weight) .5) (and (< (user-age user) new-age-threshold*) (< (karma user) new-karma-threshold*)))) Since your age and karma don't seem to be a problem, I'd guess an admin or editor marked you as ignored, or an admin reduced your weight.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
Interesting - thanks. I wish I could upvote you.
jacquesm 17y ago
No, that isn't it, RoG is well above those thresholds.

idlewords 17y ago

I think what it boils down to is that the devoting logic is easy to trigger and permanent. I haven't had the ability to up or downvote in about six months.

ErrantX 17y ago
I've not heard of the automatic bans lasting that long??? The longest I ever had was about 2 months (give or take - I was away for part of it). The longest ever someone has mentioned to me has been about 3 1/2 months
- idlewords 17y ago
  Then I am your new record! Just checked it and it happily fails.

thirdusername 17y ago

It's the same for me and has been like that for weeks, months(?). Having your votes on hacker news isn't exactly important to life as others have pointed out but it's slightly demoralizing whenever I forget myself and vote on something only to realize the system just ignores me. I'm useless and valued less than even a new user. :( I'm considering creating a new user because of that as I've tried to just wait for it to work again hoping it's temporary. I have no idea what caused me to loose my voting rights in the first place and there's no way for me to change my behavior if it's undesirable. I've for the record never voted maliciously and this is my username because I've lost my password twice before not because I have several users to vote with.

bioweek 17y ago

What does dl;dr: mean? I couldn't find it in the urban dictionary.

lt 17y ago
Not sure if you are sarcastic, but I'm pretty sure he meant tl; dr http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Yes - thanks - now corrected.
- ektimo 17y ago
  For some browsers you will need to use: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

icey 17y ago

I know this may not be the same situation as yours, and it may not be entirely helpful to you; but whenever I've had a problem with my account I've just sent a note to PG and it's gotten taken care of within a day or so. (I have had voting problems previously.)

wensing 17y ago

I had no idea HN's defense mechanisms were this sophisticated.

thaumaturgy 17y ago

Considering that pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a short list of people whose comments he tends to find interesting, I doubt this was intentional. It also might've been better handled by a short email to him.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
> pg a while back mentioned you specifically on a > short list of people whose comments he tends to > find interesting ... Really? I didn't know. Do you have a reference? > It also might've been better handled by a short > email to him. To be honest, I never actually thought of that.
- thaumaturgy 17y ago
  I thought it was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845938 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=845938 ...but it's not. Might've been somewhere else, or I might be mistaken.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    That's the reference I found, and I found no others. Never mind, it was a nice thought while it lasted. 8-)

yes_its_giles 17y ago

Just create a new account. I get banned all the time. This is my third account. You can't take it personally. It's either some person being wrong about you or some automated system. Who cares? I love it when I get banned, it means I won't be back for a while, until the desire for attention overcomes the inertia. This site is kinda like Get Satisfaction for bloggers. "You don't have to create an account. It's just that everybody on this one thread is talking about you right now, and they're all taking your lack of response to mean something." I hate the karma system. Any site that has one is fundamentally flawed (detailed rant: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-open-door-heal-or-die.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2008/05/summon-monsters-ope...). It's an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship, and I hate to kick somebody when they're down, but this guy, with all his sad whining about "I don't know what I did wrong, why don't you love me any more"? That is not the sign of a healthy community. That is the sign of an automated, massively parallel abusive relationship. Any venture capitalist knows that you run a lot of experiments and some things fail. The karma system is fail. Throw it away. PS, please ban me.

yes_its_giles 17y ago
PPS, nothing against you, giraffes guy, I just re-read my sentence and it seemed a bit harsh. I'm just saying that a web site that makes a person unhappy is not a good thing for them to be part of, and as someone who comes back repeatedly, despite being banned, to me it looks as if your desire to come back, despite being disenfranchised, is a sure sign of dysfunction. my coming back is certainly dysfunctional, but here I am. people dig the site in spite of its dysfunctions, but it sure would be cool if PG et al just threw the dysfunctional parts away.
mcantelon 17y ago
There is no shortage of karma-free forums elsewhere full of flames and junk. The karma system is helpful in providing feedback to people with a lack of impulse control or respects for others. If you're repeatedly banned, you may want to examine how you communicate as doing so would probably increase your ability to affect change.
- 17y ago

allenbrunson 17y ago

Okay, so this topic comes up pretty frequently, so I'm going to go at it again. I, for one, completely support what pg is doing. The overall goal here is not to make any one person feel like a special snowflake. It's to keep conversation at the absolute highest possible quality. To that end, pg and and the editors curb a lot of behavior they find contrary to that goal. They kill spam. They kill articles that are too far away from our core topics. They ban trolls. They ban people who aren't quite trolls, but still have a negative effect on conversation. At the low end of the penalty scale, they sometimes take away your voting privileges, for awhile, or potentially forever. I'm guessing that means: we like what you have to say just fine, but we think your voting patterns are harming the site. I've noticed this happening to a lot of people, so I've used that feedback to modify my own behavior. I try to make about four or five comment upvotes for every downvote, at least. I don't downvote anything into negative points unless I think it is really harsh and goes very much against the grain. The details don't matter, but the overall outcome does: I try to behave in a manner that I think is good for the site. If it turns out that pg disagrees with what I'm doing, I'm perfectly fine with that. If he takes away my voting rights or bans me outright, I will still think he's doing a good job. Here's why I think so: just look at this place! Have you ever seen an internet hangout that got this old and/or this big, yet remained as civil and valuable as this one? I certainly haven't. That says to me that pg isn't just doing something right, he's doing something incredibly right. I am frankly a lot less impressed by the community-building track record of any of the complainers.

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
Largely speaking I agree with you. My problem here is that I don't know what I've done wrong. If those responsible (PG and his editors) want to communicate a message to me, they've failed. I haven't gone around upvoting and downvoting excessively. I've upvoted a few things I think are of value, and I don't remember downvoting anything recently. I'm just confused. Feedback works best when it's consistent in direction (but not in frequency) and clearly attached to the action that provoked it. I think PG and friends do a great job on this. I think this is something they get wrong.
- deleted 17y ago

pg 17y ago

A few months ago, because of the mob feel that voting was starting to have now that the site has grown so big, I started experimenting with thresholds for which votes got counted (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=871202). The best test I could think of was the average score of a user's recent comments, so I used that. Currently the threshold is 2. The reason your votes stopped counting is that you dropped just below that. Your average is currently 1.88. (Ironically, it's much higher now because of the comments on this thread, but comment averages are calculated asynchronously, so there will be a lag before yours is recalculated.) I'm probably going to do away with the display of point totals on comments entirely, because thresholds haven't fixed the problem. In that case I'll just use points internally, e.g. to sort threads, and then I'll probably go back to counting most votes. Edit: Since I was planning to toss the threshold when I stopped displaying comment scores, I just reset it to 1. Also, since users asked to see their avg comment scores in their profile pages, I just added that.

psranga 17y ago
Thanks for the response and your hard work to build up and sustain a great community! Have you thought about hiding the submitter's and commenter's name for an hour (or twelve :)) after the post is submitted? Won't that solve the problem of mob voting?
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
Doesn't that actually encourage more mob voting, as only people who the majority vote up are allowed to vote up? It seems like it would be a self-reinforcing mechanism, with people who often take unpopular stances unable to participate in determining what comments and stories get the most votes?
- pg 17y ago
  I didn't mean mob in the sense of groupthink, but in the sense of a volatile, easily swayed mass. The situation I'm worried is the one where voters end up being like a crowd egging on two people who are fighting.

tokenadult 17y ago

Thanks to everyone for their interesting comments. Some of the forms of site behavior mentioned here I don't think I have ever observed. I don't read the code for the site software, so I just use the site empirically. The discussion of trade-offs involved in different kinds of site voting behavior defaults has been very helpful to me. My overall perspective on any online forum's forum rules is that I just deal with them. I don't take any set of rules personally. I don't assume any kind of enforcement action or limitation on my own forum participation is directed at me as an individual, but rather is a forum management response to forum issues. If I enjoy a forum, I keep right on participating. If I don't enjoy a forum, I take my participation elsewhere without feeling offended. I happen to like HN a lot. To each their own. As to specific observations of voting behavior, to the best of my knowledge and belief, when I upvote a comment or submission, and when I downvote a comment, my votes immediately change the score of the item I have just voted on. I try in my own mind to upvote more often than downvote, but I have no way to keep track of my actual count of votes up or down. I do like to clean up the comments, so I definitely downvote from time to time, and sometimes in bursts of downvotes in one thread. Unless I am wholly mistaken in my observation, my votes count as ups or downs on those items, in real time. It has been my observation that my own personal karma score will sometimes be stable for hours at a time, even if I have made new comments or submitted new articles, and it may be (I don't know) that I am running into some automated response of the site software such that my karma score is frozen if I have just been downvoting repeatedly. But it often seems that overnight, or after a while, my personal karma score becomes unstuck, and anyway I don't worry about this too much. I look at my threads view from time to time both to see if anyone has replied to any of my comments and to see what the aggregate votes are on those comments. If I am below 1 in aggregate score on some comment I have made, I try to think why readers would decide to downvote it. If I see someone else get a conspicuously high net score on a comment in a thread where I have also commented, I try to figure out what he or she did right to achieve commendation from other participants. As long as the site in general is worth reading and interesting to me, I don't especially worry about how its voting behavior is implemented. It's fun for me to learn from other participants here what kind of rules are visible in the source code and what kind of incentives may be designed by management to keep the conversation worthwhile. Since 1992, I have been a moderator on one or another of a variety of online forums, and I'm always deeply curious about what makes online communities successful and valuable to participants. I think HN is doing a good job. P.S. I like many of RiderOfGiraffes's submissions and comments, and have certainly upvoted more than a few (and perhaps downvoted none of them). I too recall some thread in which pg mentioned RiderOfGiraffes favorably, although I don't have the link at hand. I would regret seeing RiderOfGiraffes leaving the site or changing his username, because I like to see familiar usernames as a clue that a comment or submission will be worth a read.

elblanco 17y ago

I've noticed this same effect as well. I thought that it wasn't counted for some period of time + it wasn't counted unless there was a reply to the comment or some such.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

tmsh 17y ago

It's amazing how voting gets pretty complex, pretty fast. Although, these are more ballot-based, I remember reading about this in my discrete math class (in high school!): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system I second a couple of people's comments about how it's very cool PG is constantly trying to improve the system. I've sometimes read his comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg), and one can tell he really cares about the level of discourse (even if he just writes, 'Please stop', etc.). The idea of preventing 'mob feel' reminds me of America's system of checks and balances. A democracy/republic with three branches of government is not a perfect system, but it's been sustainable. I don't know the right way to do voting, but I'd recommend pg and whoever else is involved in this discussion -- think about it in terms of time (i.e., too many processes running in similar time intervals can get out of hand -- exe, leg and s.ct. are all staggered in terms of their time horizons) and symmetry (i.e., balanced levels of power). Arguably, in a majority rule situation, the government's checks are in place primarily to protect minority rights (from mob rule). This seems a little different from the 'mob rule' problem being discussed (where people gravitate into two-sided arguments). But anyway, perhaps I'd try to figure out fractional voting. People with more karma (maybe 50% weighted by total karma and 50% weighted by karma velocity over the past couple of weeks) can upvote with maybe something like 1.5 the votes of everyone else. But if you ask me, everyone's downvote should be significantly less than 1. Though, there could be again a 50% total and 50% velocity function for how each user's posts and comments are treated. I.e, if a user starts posting really bad stuff, then they should be able to be voted down much more quickly. But arguably, this part of the system should be tinkered with much less. Everyone, theoretically, should have a right to say whatever want. Hmm, maybe they could be forwarded to the rules for discussion and be delayed from posting (like a Hockey penalty box?) I don't know. It's a complex issue. Maybe it's good enough the way it is. As this system moves forward though, it'd probably be smart to build in ways to vote/approve changes to the system. Not for everything, but big things (analog is the presidential election. People would probably feel a lot better about it all. It's strange. Maybe you need a Constitution too. Update. One last little idea. You could introduce new voting functionality perhaps as A-B tests. Some posts randomly get flagged for voting with feature X, some don't. If you could establish some metric to judge 'satisfaction' with the experience (more good karma in the discussion?), you could, basically, build 'learning' into your system.