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The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive. For one thing, it establishes a mindset of "internet points" which encourages grubbing for upvotes, espec

by gue5t 11y ago

The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive. For one thing, it establishes a mindset of "internet points" which encourages grubbing for upvotes, especially on HN where you must either grind out 500 points worth of relatively meaningless comments, or wait until you have the time to post 500 points worth of useful messages, which takes much longer, before you can use downvotes. If your opinions don't match the overarching consensus of the community, it may take forever because people downvote those with which they strongly disagree. The goal of user feedback on submissions and comments should be to gain information about the comments in a more nuanced system than the linear "good/bad" scale, so that the site can make use of this information to help users achieve their browsing goals. The other problem with up/down votes is that they're used to decide ordering, i.e. visibility, and everyone wants their comments to be read (that was the motivation for posting them). Thus there's a natural incentive to try to grab the screenspace with the most eyeballs. People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other "siblings" in the tree. These are noise votes that provide no insight into any inherent property of the content, but simply fall out of the misaligned incentives. I'd like to see a system which lets HN answer the following questions: Is a comment well-written but trollbait? Is a comment a simple request for explanation, or a brilliant informative summary of a topic? Is a comment accidentally on the wrong post, or is it someone mistaken about matters of fact? Is a comment political or technical? Is it a first-person account from someone involved in the article? Is it anecdata? Is it an empty "me too"? There are many roles comments can be playing and if you're reading HN with a particular goal in mind, sorting user content into these buckets would be very useful. Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago. The reason HN's is so poor is because the incentives are misaligned and pg does not actually care about the quality of discourse here, but merely the quantity and subject of discussion (because HN exists to farm cultural capital for venture capitalists). I do not believe much thought has been put into optimizing HN for the people who read and comment on it. Edit: I can't believe this article got flagged and is no longer visible on the HN frontpage. This system is so dysfunctional.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive." > "Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago." Upvotes/downvotes are not productive, yet you want to replace it with a system that places extra emphasis on that type of metadata? > "People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other "siblings" in the tree." I'd suggest a better fix is to allow for collapsing comment threads. It's easy to tell when a thread has passed the point of no return when it comes to substance. You might miss the odd one or two interesting comments, but it'd definitely add to the overall HN experience.
- gue5t 11y ago
  Metadata is useful! The problem is that 1D "good/bad" being used to order comments is not a reasonable approach. In a more nuanced system there's less incentive (other than wrecking) to inaccurately mark comments as being "informative" or "technical" or "political", because instead of changing global comment visibility you're only changing it for the subset of users who are using that attribute to guide their reading. There are honest differences of opinion as to whether a comment fits in certain categories, but these are more specific and less contentious than "good/bad" and so I'd expect a much better SNR on them. Collapsing threads is nice but the importance of defaults to the user experience is hard to overstate. At each step of an interaction chain more users will fall off and not end up at the goal. Lots of people will never use comment collapsing if they have to manually do it.
lfowles 11y ago
> Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago. The SoylentNews guys tore into the moderation system and found it was pretty arbitrary, it may be worth seeing how they've revamped it (if that's done yet).

by gue5t 11y ago

ZenoArrow 11y ago

> "The system of upvotes and downvotes is not productive." > "Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago." Upvotes/downvotes are not productive, yet you want to replace it with a system that places extra emphasis on that type of metadata? > "People are incentivized, then, to post at the top of threads or reply to the most upvoted comment, to upvote parent comments of their own, and to downvote other "siblings" in the tree." I'd suggest a better fix is to allow for collapsing comment threads. It's easy to tell when a thread has passed the point of no return when it comes to substance. You might miss the odd one or two interesting comments, but it'd definitely add to the overall HN experience.

gue5t 11y ago
Metadata is useful! The problem is that 1D "good/bad" being used to order comments is not a reasonable approach. In a more nuanced system there's less incentive (other than wrecking) to inaccurately mark comments as being "informative" or "technical" or "political", because instead of changing global comment visibility you're only changing it for the subset of users who are using that attribute to guide their reading. There are honest differences of opinion as to whether a comment fits in certain categories, but these are more specific and less contentious than "good/bad" and so I'd expect a much better SNR on them. Collapsing threads is nice but the importance of defaults to the user experience is hard to overstate. At each step of an interaction chain more users will fall off and not end up at the goal. Lots of people will never use comment collapsing if they have to manually do it.

lfowles 11y ago

> Slashdot had a better system than HN has, decades ago. The SoylentNews guys tore into the moderation system and found it was pretty arbitrary, it may be worth seeing how they've revamped it (if that's done yet).