30 ms·

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

by 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.
  - icey 17y ago
    Would pushing highly turbulent comments further down in the thread accomplish some of what you're going for? In a large thread the arguments would fall to the bottom. I would probably rather read an 8 point comment with 10 ups and 2 downs than one with 110 ups and 102 downs.
    - gojomo 17y ago
      I would prefer the 110/102 comment. If it has that many upvotes, it's probably not rude or uncivil -- just controversial. Disagreement-downvoters have been nudging it down, but someone else always comes along an nudges it up. That makes it more interesting than a crowd-pandering 10/2. (I think the up/down totals might be shown to good effect, not necessarily cluttering the main thread, but on the item detail/reply page.)
      - elblanco 17y ago
        Total votes as well as up and down votes are just as interesting a metric to determine interest in a comment or post.
  - crocowhile 17y ago
    I don't understand how was thresholding related to this - at all. RoG was getting more downvotes than average HN user (1.88 vs 2.0). How does inhibiting his power to rate help this "crowd egging" thing you are referring to?
    - pg 17y ago
      It didn't use to be such a problem, say, a year ago, and my theory was that this was largely because there were fewer voters a year ago. Using comment average seemed like the best way to decrease the effective number of voters. But as I said, it didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.
      - Freebytes 17y ago
thorax 17y ago
I really like seeing the number of points next to comments. When I come to a discussion late, it's the best weapon I have to skim through lower replies to catch the "theme" of the discussion. It's especially important on nested replies that may be attached to a highly voted root comment. If you decide to hide comment points, perhaps consider at least showing the points after you vote. I'm not sure if that would encourage voting, though, in a case where people would have skipped voting before. I know I would vote more often in that case.
- pg 17y ago
  Yeah, that was why I brought back points the last time I tried removing them. Without points it was harder to read comment threads. But I have some other ideas about how to solve that problem. For example, I could distinguish comments by users whose recent comments are over a certain average. That approaches the score of a specific comment as the window size decreases. If I didn't discard outliers, as I currently do when calculating comment averages, I could probably even catch the case of the high scoring comment made by a user with an otherwise low average. I may also try letting users specify other users whose comments they're interested in, and distinguish those in the display of the thread. I don't know whether these will work, but I want to try them and see what happens. If anyone has other suggestions for things to try I'd be glad to hear them.
  - radu_floricica 17y ago
    I found reading comments without scores very refreshing. The biggest problem I'd have guessed would be the lack of self-limiting when voting. Without scores people would keep voting a good comment, so I'd imagine karma would be counted a bit differently. Averaging comment karma sounds like a terrible idea. Some of the best posts are made in intelligent, long conversations several levels down the comment tree, which are almost never upvoted. Wouldn't it discourage such conversations?
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      > Wouldn't it discourage such conversations? Absolutely. You can expect a complete change in atmosphere due to this.
b3eck 17y ago
One suggestion to try: for a young comment whose score has not stabilized (i.e. high recent variability), then no score is displayed except for an indicator for users whose recent comments have low recent variability and high score. (Edited for brevity)
fjabre 17y ago
The problem with mobs is they gang up on individuals and the problem with that is the mob can easily over power an individual. If you take away the mob's power by only allowing points to go down to 0 or 1 for example instead of -4 it might feel less mob-ish.. EDIT: The end result of mob encouraged commenting is someone ends up with negative points for their comment(s).. Maybe only users who've reached certain karma level should have the ability to down vote below 1. Reduce the size of the mob?
- sailormoon 17y ago
  But then you lose the power to distinguish between the genuinely wrong/inappropriate and the merely banal. There is a case to punish the former but the latter should probably just be ignored.
  - fjabre 17y ago
    That is a bit a of a trade-off, agreed.. How about anything below a certain threshold of down votes just gets deleted and not just grayed-out? That would eliminate the 'wrong/inappropriate' all together and the mob would disband? Human behaviour is complicated indeed.
    - sailormoon 17y ago
      That would be open to terrible abuse! You can't undo a delete; there's no chance for the larger crowd to undo unfair downvoting. I have my own favoured scheme, which is basically votes counting less the further they go above/below neutral. The first eight votes will get you up to 8. But then you need another 8 to get up to twelve, 16 to get to 16, 32 to get to 20, etc. Downvoting would be similar but without the positive bias, ie 4 to -4, then another 8 to get to -8, etc. By removing the possibility of "windfall" results, that system might be reducing the incentive to appeal to the mob in the first place. And people will be less likely to add yet another vote if it's already +12, say - they know their vote's mostly impotent by then. Could settle things down. I thought it wrong before, when unlimited downvotes were possible - there'd always be some sorry cur saying something the crowd didn't like and down he went, by 20, 30, 50. That was terrible, and has now been thankfully stopped. But ridiculously high upvotes continue and create undesirable incentives, IMO. Wow, that was an essay, sorry, hehe
mattmaroon 17y ago
That's a neat idea.
axod 17y ago
If you are going to discount some peoples votes, (Mine seem to currently be discounted), can you let them know that? Or at least not update the UI for them when they click an arrow, or just not give them an arrow at all. Then I won't be wasting time clicking arrows that don't do anything :/
- jacquesm 17y ago
  My thoughts exactly. I feel like I'm somehow being toyed with. That is not the intention, I'm sure but still to have a 'pacifier' vote button there that is not functional feels like I'm in someone else's car with a plastic non-functional steering wheel.
  - 10ren 17y ago
    So you are axod are also in the same boat? But yours are some of the most interesting comments... and your comment averages are not below the 2 cutoff that pg stated above, anyway: axod is 3.65: http://searchyc.com/user/axod?only=comments&sort=by_points http://searchyc.com/user/axod?only=comments&sort=by_poin... jacquesm is 3.03: http://searchyc.com/user/+jacquesm?only=comments&sort=by_points http://searchyc.com/user/+jacquesm?only=comments&sort=by... Possibly the code is more broken than pg realizes (or perhaps it's searchyc that's got it wrong).
    - jodrellblank 17y ago
      I think it's happening to me as well, and searchyc rates me as just over 3 points per comment. I didn't realise it happened at all until seeing Jacquesm's comments about it, and I'm still undecided about whether it's annoying or not. It's more annoying when a thread goes "comment by me no votes, comment by someone else upvotes, reply by me no votes", for instance, and the result of that kind of thing needs an internal adjustment of the sort "clearly my replies aren't as good as I'm thinking they are". I get a similar feeling from this - yes I'm going out of my way to vote up effortful comments and vote down weak, silly, effortless comments but maybe my votes aren't as 'good' as they should be. Not like being patronised by a car with a plastic steering wheel as mentioned above, but like something that's out of alignment due to misunderstanding the "HN way".
elblanco 17y ago
Perhaps instead of point totals, put a comment into a limited set of categories or some such. Popular - >= 10 votes Interesting - 3-9 votes Contributor - 1-3 votes Neutral - no votes Unpopular - -1 votes Detractive - <= -2 votes And show those instead of points or votes. Karma could still be calculated normally, and the votes could be used internally for thread sorting.
CraigBuchek 17y ago
Setting the threshold at 2 seems a bit high to me. It basically requires that (on average) at least 1 person upvotes every comment you make. That's unlikely to happen in a nested thread of back-and-forth conversation. And it's less likely to happen for people that are a little late to the conversation but still have some valid input. I tend to fall into the latter category -- I'm often reading posts that are several days old in my RSS reader. Setting the threshold around 1.5 might work better. Or perhaps whatever threshold might allow 75% or 80% of readers/contributors to vote.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Any threshold is wrong. Votes are a currency with which users tell each other what their feelings are, setting some arbitrary limit on that ability to express means the underlying system is broken. Either voting works as a mechanism to identify quality content, or it doesn't. If voting is to be limited to those that want to engage in group-think (the quickest way to boost your average is to post stuff people will find agreeable) then we'll soon have very bland conversations here.
  - elblanco 17y ago
    I think that my personal problem is that the semantics of voting are usually more related to popular/unpopular instead of quality/poor quality. Not that I have a particular problem with popular/unpopular as the semantics per se, just that that seems to be the way the community uses them (myself included most of the time).
jacquesm 17y ago
To use the voting average is a really bad way of doing this. I answer a lot of 'Ask HN' style threads, these are hardly ever voted up and they are a ton of work. If the effect of this change is that doing work like that gets punished then that is really putting the horse behind the cart. For instance: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049551 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049551 Essentially you are punishing people for being nice to others.
- noodle 17y ago
  it punishes people for a lot of things: for being nice to others and responding to unresponded-to inquiries, for participating in lengthy discussions that don't particularly keep the majority of people's interest, expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc.. why not simply implement a minimum karma score barrier past which your vote counts? it would simply mean that you must contribute to the community before your vote has weight. keeps newer people from flooding things immediately. could even be a rolling barrier based on the average karma per user.
  - jeromec 17y ago
    ...expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc.. Amen to that. I'm still a fairly new member, and recently I finally got past the karma threshold to be allowed to downvote. I felt like I'd ascended to Mt. Olympus, and couldn't wait for the chance to mete out some dings the way I'd been invisibly hit so often before. Of course, I actually have yet to issue a single downvote, as I try to take the high ground of only downvoting for abusive type comments, not just something I disagree with. I also feel I earned my karma the hardest way: I've only submitted one or two things, and I don't tailor comments to please others. I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      > I don't tailor comments to please others. Super. Neither do I, prepare for the occasional -4. And don't worry about it. > I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted. That's a double edged one. On the one hand, yes, you're right. And some of the 'top submitters' here take the easy road by putting in a lot of the mainstream / techcrunch stuff. On the other hand to get some points for finding a really nice article sends the signal that says 'well done', find us more stuff of that caliber. Personally I think that domains that have had more than say 20 links submitted (TC, wsj, cnn, bbc, sciam, the top blogs and so on) should no longer be rewarded. It's basically a race between the people that have their RSS feeders primed and want to be the first to submit that sort of thing.
10ren 17y ago
My votes haven't counted for a while, and my comment average is 2.64 according to http://searchyc.com/user/10ren?only=comments&sort=by_points http://searchyc.com/user/10ren?only=comments&sort=by_poi... I think a respectful approach is to be upfront, and just say there's a cut-off, instead of making the votes appear to count. I assume you want to obscure it, to protect HN from scamming, but I'm not sure that valuing protection over respect will work in the long term. EDIT I'd like to upvote some of the comments here, but what's the point? They won't count.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Not only that, if it is known beforehand that my votes won't count don't show me the silly buttons.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    There's a contract that user interfaces have with people, it kind of goes something like this: I will show you a button. When you press it, something will happen. I should do everything possible to make the same thing happen every time, because if I keep making it different things, it's probably going to piss you off a lot. Seems like we're kind of getting backwards who is supposed to be in charge here, the person or the algorithm.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      > it's probably going to piss you off a lot. We're getting there. The last few weeks have been pretty rough in this respect. Cheating your way to the top is fine, simple requests get denied, basic site functionality appears to be broken but turns out to be working as designed only nobody thought of making it plain. It's a fine line between subtlety and disrespect.
abstractbill 17y ago
For what it's worth, at jtv we used to have a policy of silently failing various actions when one of our many spam-like flags got raised. It seems like such a great idea - the spammers will have been caught, but they won't know it. Unfortunately I think we've found over time that the negative consequences for users who are falsely flagged as being spammers just aren't worth it, and we have become more explicit about telling users they've been flagged in some way. Long story short: If you're going to disable some action I think it's actually better in the long run to make it obvious that's what you're doing.
TrevorJ 17y ago
I always find your continued thinking on ways to improve and maintain this site to be insightful, thank you for sharing so transparently.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  > thank you for sharing so transparently. You must have missed the bit where this was brought up many times before over a period of months. This is the first time there actually is an answer and it turns out that at least from where I'm sitting this 'feature' was actually detrimental. If there would have been some more user input I highly doubt this would have been implemented.
tptacek 17y ago
I'm 2.89, on a downward trend, and the past several of my votes haven't counted. Is something else going on? I recognize the good intention, but the "vote not counting" thing is on a visceral, psychological level very irritating. It feels antagonistic. I recommend that you kill that feature in the short term, and then proceed to remove scores from most comment displays.
- pg 17y ago
  Are you sure your votes don't count? Your average comment score is way over the threshold, and your account hasn't been flagged for any kind of abuse. There are other reasons individual votes may sometimes be ignored (e.g. apparent karma bombing, or voting rings) but if you upvote a randomly chosen comment, it should work. Let me know if it doesn't.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    I've never seen an upvote fail. It's only downvotes. I know that sometimes, if I downvote, nothing happens, I reload the page, nothing happens, but if I click through to the direct link for the comment the vote has taken effect --- in other words, I know to check for that. What I'm seeing is, most of my downvotes don't count. (Finding a random comment to downvote is more effort than I want to spend on this problem).
    - pg 17y ago
      Ah, I see what's going on. If more than a certain percentage of your votes are downvotes (currently the threshold is 65%) the downarrow stops working till downvotes drop below that threshold.
      - elblanco 17y ago
        That's amazing to me that somebody can have more than 65% of their votes be downvotes.
        17y ago

by pg 17y ago

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.
- icey 17y ago
  Would pushing highly turbulent comments further down in the thread accomplish some of what you're going for? In a large thread the arguments would fall to the bottom. I would probably rather read an 8 point comment with 10 ups and 2 downs than one with 110 ups and 102 downs.
  - gojomo 17y ago
    I would prefer the 110/102 comment. If it has that many upvotes, it's probably not rude or uncivil -- just controversial. Disagreement-downvoters have been nudging it down, but someone else always comes along an nudges it up. That makes it more interesting than a crowd-pandering 10/2. (I think the up/down totals might be shown to good effect, not necessarily cluttering the main thread, but on the item detail/reply page.)
    - elblanco 17y ago
      Total votes as well as up and down votes are just as interesting a metric to determine interest in a comment or post.
- crocowhile 17y ago
  I don't understand how was thresholding related to this - at all. RoG was getting more downvotes than average HN user (1.88 vs 2.0). How does inhibiting his power to rate help this "crowd egging" thing you are referring to?
  - pg 17y ago
    It didn't use to be such a problem, say, a year ago, and my theory was that this was largely because there were fewer voters a year ago. Using comment average seemed like the best way to decrease the effective number of voters. But as I said, it didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.
    - Freebytes 17y ago

thorax 17y ago

I really like seeing the number of points next to comments. When I come to a discussion late, it's the best weapon I have to skim through lower replies to catch the "theme" of the discussion. It's especially important on nested replies that may be attached to a highly voted root comment. If you decide to hide comment points, perhaps consider at least showing the points after you vote. I'm not sure if that would encourage voting, though, in a case where people would have skipped voting before. I know I would vote more often in that case.

pg 17y ago
Yeah, that was why I brought back points the last time I tried removing them. Without points it was harder to read comment threads. But I have some other ideas about how to solve that problem. For example, I could distinguish comments by users whose recent comments are over a certain average. That approaches the score of a specific comment as the window size decreases. If I didn't discard outliers, as I currently do when calculating comment averages, I could probably even catch the case of the high scoring comment made by a user with an otherwise low average. I may also try letting users specify other users whose comments they're interested in, and distinguish those in the display of the thread. I don't know whether these will work, but I want to try them and see what happens. If anyone has other suggestions for things to try I'd be glad to hear them.
- radu_floricica 17y ago
  I found reading comments without scores very refreshing. The biggest problem I'd have guessed would be the lack of self-limiting when voting. Without scores people would keep voting a good comment, so I'd imagine karma would be counted a bit differently. Averaging comment karma sounds like a terrible idea. Some of the best posts are made in intelligent, long conversations several levels down the comment tree, which are almost never upvoted. Wouldn't it discourage such conversations?
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > Wouldn't it discourage such conversations? Absolutely. You can expect a complete change in atmosphere due to this.

b3eck 17y ago

One suggestion to try: for a young comment whose score has not stabilized (i.e. high recent variability), then no score is displayed except for an indicator for users whose recent comments have low recent variability and high score. (Edited for brevity)

fjabre 17y ago

The problem with mobs is they gang up on individuals and the problem with that is the mob can easily over power an individual. If you take away the mob's power by only allowing points to go down to 0 or 1 for example instead of -4 it might feel less mob-ish.. EDIT: The end result of mob encouraged commenting is someone ends up with negative points for their comment(s).. Maybe only users who've reached certain karma level should have the ability to down vote below 1. Reduce the size of the mob?

sailormoon 17y ago
But then you lose the power to distinguish between the genuinely wrong/inappropriate and the merely banal. There is a case to punish the former but the latter should probably just be ignored.
- fjabre 17y ago
  That is a bit a of a trade-off, agreed.. How about anything below a certain threshold of down votes just gets deleted and not just grayed-out? That would eliminate the 'wrong/inappropriate' all together and the mob would disband? Human behaviour is complicated indeed.
  - sailormoon 17y ago
    That would be open to terrible abuse! You can't undo a delete; there's no chance for the larger crowd to undo unfair downvoting. I have my own favoured scheme, which is basically votes counting less the further they go above/below neutral. The first eight votes will get you up to 8. But then you need another 8 to get up to twelve, 16 to get to 16, 32 to get to 20, etc. Downvoting would be similar but without the positive bias, ie 4 to -4, then another 8 to get to -8, etc. By removing the possibility of "windfall" results, that system might be reducing the incentive to appeal to the mob in the first place. And people will be less likely to add yet another vote if it's already +12, say - they know their vote's mostly impotent by then. Could settle things down. I thought it wrong before, when unlimited downvotes were possible - there'd always be some sorry cur saying something the crowd didn't like and down he went, by 20, 30, 50. That was terrible, and has now been thankfully stopped. But ridiculously high upvotes continue and create undesirable incentives, IMO. Wow, that was an essay, sorry, hehe

mattmaroon 17y ago

That's a neat idea.

axod 17y ago

If you are going to discount some peoples votes, (Mine seem to currently be discounted), can you let them know that? Or at least not update the UI for them when they click an arrow, or just not give them an arrow at all. Then I won't be wasting time clicking arrows that don't do anything :/

jacquesm 17y ago
My thoughts exactly. I feel like I'm somehow being toyed with. That is not the intention, I'm sure but still to have a 'pacifier' vote button there that is not functional feels like I'm in someone else's car with a plastic non-functional steering wheel.
- 10ren 17y ago
  So you are axod are also in the same boat? But yours are some of the most interesting comments... and your comment averages are not below the 2 cutoff that pg stated above, anyway: axod is 3.65: http://searchyc.com/user/axod?only=comments&sort=by_points http://searchyc.com/user/axod?only=comments&sort=by_poin... jacquesm is 3.03: http://searchyc.com/user/+jacquesm?only=comments&sort=by_points http://searchyc.com/user/+jacquesm?only=comments&sort=by... Possibly the code is more broken than pg realizes (or perhaps it's searchyc that's got it wrong).
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    I think it's happening to me as well, and searchyc rates me as just over 3 points per comment. I didn't realise it happened at all until seeing Jacquesm's comments about it, and I'm still undecided about whether it's annoying or not. It's more annoying when a thread goes "comment by me no votes, comment by someone else upvotes, reply by me no votes", for instance, and the result of that kind of thing needs an internal adjustment of the sort "clearly my replies aren't as good as I'm thinking they are". I get a similar feeling from this - yes I'm going out of my way to vote up effortful comments and vote down weak, silly, effortless comments but maybe my votes aren't as 'good' as they should be. Not like being patronised by a car with a plastic steering wheel as mentioned above, but like something that's out of alignment due to misunderstanding the "HN way".

elblanco 17y ago

Perhaps instead of point totals, put a comment into a limited set of categories or some such. Popular - >= 10 votes Interesting - 3-9 votes Contributor - 1-3 votes Neutral - no votes Unpopular - -1 votes Detractive - <= -2 votes And show those instead of points or votes. Karma could still be calculated normally, and the votes could be used internally for thread sorting.

CraigBuchek 17y ago

Setting the threshold at 2 seems a bit high to me. It basically requires that (on average) at least 1 person upvotes every comment you make. That's unlikely to happen in a nested thread of back-and-forth conversation. And it's less likely to happen for people that are a little late to the conversation but still have some valid input. I tend to fall into the latter category -- I'm often reading posts that are several days old in my RSS reader. Setting the threshold around 1.5 might work better. Or perhaps whatever threshold might allow 75% or 80% of readers/contributors to vote.

jacquesm 17y ago
Any threshold is wrong. Votes are a currency with which users tell each other what their feelings are, setting some arbitrary limit on that ability to express means the underlying system is broken. Either voting works as a mechanism to identify quality content, or it doesn't. If voting is to be limited to those that want to engage in group-think (the quickest way to boost your average is to post stuff people will find agreeable) then we'll soon have very bland conversations here.
- elblanco 17y ago
  I think that my personal problem is that the semantics of voting are usually more related to popular/unpopular instead of quality/poor quality. Not that I have a particular problem with popular/unpopular as the semantics per se, just that that seems to be the way the community uses them (myself included most of the time).

jacquesm 17y ago

To use the voting average is a really bad way of doing this. I answer a lot of 'Ask HN' style threads, these are hardly ever voted up and they are a ton of work. If the effect of this change is that doing work like that gets punished then that is really putting the horse behind the cart. For instance: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049551 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1049551 Essentially you are punishing people for being nice to others.

noodle 17y ago
it punishes people for a lot of things: for being nice to others and responding to unresponded-to inquiries, for participating in lengthy discussions that don't particularly keep the majority of people's interest, expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc.. why not simply implement a minimum karma score barrier past which your vote counts? it would simply mean that you must contribute to the community before your vote has weight. keeps newer people from flooding things immediately. could even be a rolling barrier based on the average karma per user.
- jeromec 17y ago
  ...expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc.. Amen to that. I'm still a fairly new member, and recently I finally got past the karma threshold to be allowed to downvote. I felt like I'd ascended to Mt. Olympus, and couldn't wait for the chance to mete out some dings the way I'd been invisibly hit so often before. Of course, I actually have yet to issue a single downvote, as I try to take the high ground of only downvoting for abusive type comments, not just something I disagree with. I also feel I earned my karma the hardest way: I've only submitted one or two things, and I don't tailor comments to please others. I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > I don't tailor comments to please others. Super. Neither do I, prepare for the occasional -4. And don't worry about it. > I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted. That's a double edged one. On the one hand, yes, you're right. And some of the 'top submitters' here take the easy road by putting in a lot of the mainstream / techcrunch stuff. On the other hand to get some points for finding a really nice article sends the signal that says 'well done', find us more stuff of that caliber. Personally I think that domains that have had more than say 20 links submitted (TC, wsj, cnn, bbc, sciam, the top blogs and so on) should no longer be rewarded. It's basically a race between the people that have their RSS feeders primed and want to be the first to submit that sort of thing.

10ren 17y ago

My votes haven't counted for a while, and my comment average is 2.64 according to http://searchyc.com/user/10ren?only=comments&sort=by_points http://searchyc.com/user/10ren?only=comments&sort=by_poi... I think a respectful approach is to be upfront, and just say there's a cut-off, instead of making the votes appear to count. I assume you want to obscure it, to protect HN from scamming, but I'm not sure that valuing protection over respect will work in the long term. EDIT I'd like to upvote some of the comments here, but what's the point? They won't count.

jacquesm 17y ago
Not only that, if it is known beforehand that my votes won't count don't show me the silly buttons.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  There's a contract that user interfaces have with people, it kind of goes something like this: I will show you a button. When you press it, something will happen. I should do everything possible to make the same thing happen every time, because if I keep making it different things, it's probably going to piss you off a lot. Seems like we're kind of getting backwards who is supposed to be in charge here, the person or the algorithm.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > it's probably going to piss you off a lot. We're getting there. The last few weeks have been pretty rough in this respect. Cheating your way to the top is fine, simple requests get denied, basic site functionality appears to be broken but turns out to be working as designed only nobody thought of making it plain. It's a fine line between subtlety and disrespect.

abstractbill 17y ago

For what it's worth, at jtv we used to have a policy of silently failing various actions when one of our many spam-like flags got raised. It seems like such a great idea - the spammers will have been caught, but they won't know it. Unfortunately I think we've found over time that the negative consequences for users who are falsely flagged as being spammers just aren't worth it, and we have become more explicit about telling users they've been flagged in some way. Long story short: If you're going to disable some action I think it's actually better in the long run to make it obvious that's what you're doing.

TrevorJ 17y ago

I always find your continued thinking on ways to improve and maintain this site to be insightful, thank you for sharing so transparently.

jacquesm 17y ago
> thank you for sharing so transparently. You must have missed the bit where this was brought up many times before over a period of months. This is the first time there actually is an answer and it turns out that at least from where I'm sitting this 'feature' was actually detrimental. If there would have been some more user input I highly doubt this would have been implemented.

tptacek 17y ago

I'm 2.89, on a downward trend, and the past several of my votes haven't counted. Is something else going on? I recognize the good intention, but the "vote not counting" thing is on a visceral, psychological level very irritating. It feels antagonistic. I recommend that you kill that feature in the short term, and then proceed to remove scores from most comment displays.

pg 17y ago
Are you sure your votes don't count? Your average comment score is way over the threshold, and your account hasn't been flagged for any kind of abuse. There are other reasons individual votes may sometimes be ignored (e.g. apparent karma bombing, or voting rings) but if you upvote a randomly chosen comment, it should work. Let me know if it doesn't.
- tptacek 17y ago
  I've never seen an upvote fail. It's only downvotes. I know that sometimes, if I downvote, nothing happens, I reload the page, nothing happens, but if I click through to the direct link for the comment the vote has taken effect --- in other words, I know to check for that. What I'm seeing is, most of my downvotes don't count. (Finding a random comment to downvote is more effort than I want to spend on this problem).
  - pg 17y ago
    Ah, I see what's going on. If more than a certain percentage of your votes are downvotes (currently the threshold is 65%) the downarrow stops working till downvotes drop below that threshold.
    - elblanco 17y ago
      That's amazing to me that somebody can have more than 65% of their votes be downvotes.
      - 17y ago