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My biggest complaint with reddit and hn is that there is a down-vote button. It serves no purpose the way I consume and participate in discussions. If I don't a

by cm3 11y ago

My biggest complaint with reddit and hn is that there is a down-vote button. It serves no purpose the way I consume and participate in discussions. If I don't agree or vehemently disagree with something I pass over it and that's it. I've had the opportunity to downvote and even when I had a strong opinions against what's stated in a comment I never once downvoted. In fact, I've never used the downvoting link at all. Also, I find it enlightening to read opinions of people who are on the opposite end of some belief spectrum. It broadens my view and helps me better formulate what I think. Hence, you either ban accounts for disturbing discussions repeatedly or just let everyone say whatever they think. A voting system that tries to hide comments is a bad idea. I guess my issue is with what JBReefer calls groupthink and brigading. I personally would have called stuff-people-don't-like-to-hear. Slashdot's systems used to work very well, but it's fallen apart due to the current occupants of their comment sections. HN already is an echo chamber of sorts, so trying to filter that even more is wrong.

JamilD 11y ago
I think that the point of the downvote button on HN is to reduce the visibility of comments that don't contribute to the discourse, not to dismiss dissenting opinions. This is helped by the fact that it's used sparingly and is only available to people with a certain karma threshold (an imperfect metric, but one that's worked reasonably well so far)
- nv-vn 11y ago
  Agreed, the karma barrier does help a decent amount. But even on HackerNews I see the same "downvoting mob mentality" occasionally where all comments expressing certain views or disagreeing with comments of more popular users are reduced in visibility because of down voting. In a way, it gives the higher ranked users a platform to push their own posts higher/other posts lower, not unlike the way capitalism can widen economic gaps between the rich and the poor. While it is helpful to hide comments that don't have much to do with the discussion, upvoting related comments has the same effect without the downside of making the comment invisible to people who want to see it and without impacting the user's status on HN.
sp332 11y ago
I usually just downvote comments that are factually wrong, because they sink to the bottom of the page and people are less likely to be confused by them.
- nv-vn 11y ago
  I think the best thing you can do is explain why they are factually wrong in that case and try to teach them/correct them. Otherwise, they just start to dislike the community and don't gain any new knowledge.
  - cm3 11y ago
    Precisely, if I disagree but do not counter a comment, then why should I be allowed to silently hide their comment? It's fine to upvote but downvoting makes no sense, especially anything below 1 discourages contributors, seeing how they're silenced for unpopular opinions.
    - nv-vn 11y ago
      Agreed. I really found it annoying that Github decided to include -1 on PRs and issues because it encourages people to just pick the cheapest cost option and not express their argument against a change, which is probably one of the best possible ways to block new contributors.
kwgardner 11y ago
We actually thought the same thing about downvotes, which is why we removed them in Imzy. One of the things we've tried to do to decrease the groupthink/echochamber is get rid of any kind of "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed. I'm curious, because I came around to Slashdot after its peak had passed--what parts of their system did you think worked best, so I can make sure we try to do the best we can on our platform?
- protomyth 11y ago
  Not OP - I was on slashdot back in the day and I did enjoy the reason for the moderation on the post. I'm also a bit convinced that the rule you could moderate a discussion or post in it but not both made for an interesting dynamic. The moderate the moderator was nice too. Downvotes do come in many forms, twitter didn't have downvotes until they added lists, then lists became a way to downvote.
  - kwgardner 11y ago
    Got it. Thank you for the response! It's always helpful to be able to learn more from all other platforms. We do require community leaders to enter a reason whenever they remove a post or comment, ban someone, etc., and the OP is always notified of the reason (and soon we'll be adding it so that it's visible if you have a link to the removed post/comment as well). That's really interesting about the decision to be able to moderate or post but not both. One thing we're doing in order to be able to help with moderating the moderator is that soon there will be a public leader log that shows what actions leaders have taken in their community and why they did it, so that people can see how their leaders are behaving. Hopefully as we grow we'll be able to add more tools that help leaders manage their communities and help the communities manage their leaders. :)
    - protomyth 11y ago
john2x 11y ago
What if downvotes were a limited resource (maybe time limited)? It could help if downvoters had to think twice about pushing that button, in case something else deserved their downvote more. EDIT: or a downvote requires a comment of why the parent was downvoted and/or a selection of pre-defined reasons e.g. factually incorrect, misleading, trolling, spam, etc (similar to Dota2's report system).
- b3b0p 11y ago
  My thought is downvote, but it will take away from your karma (-1 point). The only way it wouldn't or you get that point back is if you left a comment, possibly responding why you downvoted in the first place (factual, wrong, not relevant to the discussion, etc). Quid pro quo.
  - john2x 11y ago
    I think putting "real" value to karma would be a bad idea. People already karma whore even if it has no real value (although it has perceived value). I imagine it would be worse if it has some actual (limited) value.
- azemetre 11y ago
  How would you combat spamming or obvious admissions of astroturfing? Seems like it would be easy to game the system by bombarding it with "shit posts."
  - john2x 11y ago
    Hmm, how about one user downvotes, provides the appropriate reason, then others can "join or agree" with that user's downvote by upvoting his/her comment. Maybe this could somehow count as multiple downvotes with the same reason?
- cm3 11y ago
  Also anyone who downvoted without commenting should have their hn-name displayed on the right side or below in a list of silent downvoters. It should of course adapt if you comment later or remove your comment, by removing or adding your name to the downvoters list.
d0m 11y ago
Completely agree. The problem is that the downvote means too many things at the same time (Spam AND Disagree AND Not-adding-to-the-convo) HN rules suggest that one shouldn't downvote to disagree, but it's not what's happening. One solution is to keep the upvote button and replace the downvote one with a link, e.g. "Report" where you'd pick the reason.
chippy 11y ago
HN is different in that the user needs a substantial amount of karma before they can downvote (and I think theres additional levels for flagging etc). I'm not sure of the amounts and it may also take into consideration account age.
humanrebar 11y ago
I think the existence of the #nevertrump movement and the lack of downvote in presidential elections shows the need for a downvote button. To bring it back to social media, I think Facebook conversations are especially poor in quality and a way to politely disagree would be good for the site and, as facebook grows, good for discourse generally.
- cm3 11y ago
  As someone outside the US, I never understood the fixation on candidates, given that they can tell a lot but the ones who make policy are still the same think tanks, lobbyists and bureaucrats working in DC their whole life. Sure, Trump, may try to push through one or two bad things, but he doesn't control the direction of the ship at all. Without the crew of a sail ship on his side, as a metaphor, Trump can rant whatever he wants. It'll go down in the books just as the escapades of other POTUSes. What I'm getting at is that the important, life-changing stuff happens behind the curtains and POTUS is merely the pony to entertain the masses and sometimes represent the policy created by the large government body. There are thousands of things a POTUS was against but had to defend, because the POTUS was there to represent the whole in the form of someone approachable. To me this is all some weird psychological game used to manage the population, and I like to think humanity has enough experience/knowledge to aim for a reasonable world without stupidity and sentiment-based ruling. Every logician must be very sad at how the world is managed. In summary, who cares of Trump is POTUS, he'll be just another show piece without real control in a much more complex game of power dynamics. That said, if someone wants to filter trumpology, they can ignore or flag them in their personal SPAM filter and statistics will do the rest. If that doesn't work, I'm sure you can silence certain Facebook profiles for you personally, just like one doesn't attend certain social circles in the real life.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    I don't know. The DREAM act, the changes to the healthcare laws, stimulus-oriented recession recovery, the sequestration, digital surveillance, and the TPP are all very important and very much results of decisions of the President.

by cm3 11y ago

JamilD 11y ago

I think that the point of the downvote button on HN is to reduce the visibility of comments that don't contribute to the discourse, not to dismiss dissenting opinions. This is helped by the fact that it's used sparingly and is only available to people with a certain karma threshold (an imperfect metric, but one that's worked reasonably well so far)

nv-vn 11y ago
Agreed, the karma barrier does help a decent amount. But even on HackerNews I see the same "downvoting mob mentality" occasionally where all comments expressing certain views or disagreeing with comments of more popular users are reduced in visibility because of down voting. In a way, it gives the higher ranked users a platform to push their own posts higher/other posts lower, not unlike the way capitalism can widen economic gaps between the rich and the poor. While it is helpful to hide comments that don't have much to do with the discussion, upvoting related comments has the same effect without the downside of making the comment invisible to people who want to see it and without impacting the user's status on HN.

sp332 11y ago

I usually just downvote comments that are factually wrong, because they sink to the bottom of the page and people are less likely to be confused by them.

nv-vn 11y ago
I think the best thing you can do is explain why they are factually wrong in that case and try to teach them/correct them. Otherwise, they just start to dislike the community and don't gain any new knowledge.
- cm3 11y ago
  Precisely, if I disagree but do not counter a comment, then why should I be allowed to silently hide their comment? It's fine to upvote but downvoting makes no sense, especially anything below 1 discourages contributors, seeing how they're silenced for unpopular opinions.
  - nv-vn 11y ago
    Agreed. I really found it annoying that Github decided to include -1 on PRs and issues because it encourages people to just pick the cheapest cost option and not express their argument against a change, which is probably one of the best possible ways to block new contributors.

kwgardner 11y ago

We actually thought the same thing about downvotes, which is why we removed them in Imzy. One of the things we've tried to do to decrease the groupthink/echochamber is get rid of any kind of "default" communities or a universal front page or anything like that, because we believe that does lead to a lot of low quality conversations and groupthink. Instead, you only join communities you specifically opt into, and hopefully that way each community only has people who are actually passionate about those topics and discussions become more in depth and informed. I'm curious, because I came around to Slashdot after its peak had passed--what parts of their system did you think worked best, so I can make sure we try to do the best we can on our platform?

protomyth 11y ago
Not OP - I was on slashdot back in the day and I did enjoy the reason for the moderation on the post. I'm also a bit convinced that the rule you could moderate a discussion or post in it but not both made for an interesting dynamic. The moderate the moderator was nice too. Downvotes do come in many forms, twitter didn't have downvotes until they added lists, then lists became a way to downvote.
- kwgardner 11y ago
  Got it. Thank you for the response! It's always helpful to be able to learn more from all other platforms. We do require community leaders to enter a reason whenever they remove a post or comment, ban someone, etc., and the OP is always notified of the reason (and soon we'll be adding it so that it's visible if you have a link to the removed post/comment as well). That's really interesting about the decision to be able to moderate or post but not both. One thing we're doing in order to be able to help with moderating the moderator is that soon there will be a public leader log that shows what actions leaders have taken in their community and why they did it, so that people can see how their leaders are behaving. Hopefully as we grow we'll be able to add more tools that help leaders manage their communities and help the communities manage their leaders. :)
  - protomyth 11y ago

john2x 11y ago

What if downvotes were a limited resource (maybe time limited)? It could help if downvoters had to think twice about pushing that button, in case something else deserved their downvote more. EDIT: or a downvote requires a comment of why the parent was downvoted and/or a selection of pre-defined reasons e.g. factually incorrect, misleading, trolling, spam, etc (similar to Dota2's report system).

b3b0p 11y ago
My thought is downvote, but it will take away from your karma (-1 point). The only way it wouldn't or you get that point back is if you left a comment, possibly responding why you downvoted in the first place (factual, wrong, not relevant to the discussion, etc). Quid pro quo.
- john2x 11y ago
  I think putting "real" value to karma would be a bad idea. People already karma whore even if it has no real value (although it has perceived value). I imagine it would be worse if it has some actual (limited) value.
azemetre 11y ago
How would you combat spamming or obvious admissions of astroturfing? Seems like it would be easy to game the system by bombarding it with "shit posts."
- john2x 11y ago
  Hmm, how about one user downvotes, provides the appropriate reason, then others can "join or agree" with that user's downvote by upvoting his/her comment. Maybe this could somehow count as multiple downvotes with the same reason?
cm3 11y ago
Also anyone who downvoted without commenting should have their hn-name displayed on the right side or below in a list of silent downvoters. It should of course adapt if you comment later or remove your comment, by removing or adding your name to the downvoters list.

d0m 11y ago

Completely agree. The problem is that the downvote means too many things at the same time (Spam AND Disagree AND Not-adding-to-the-convo) HN rules suggest that one shouldn't downvote to disagree, but it's not what's happening. One solution is to keep the upvote button and replace the downvote one with a link, e.g. "Report" where you'd pick the reason.

chippy 11y ago

HN is different in that the user needs a substantial amount of karma before they can downvote (and I think theres additional levels for flagging etc). I'm not sure of the amounts and it may also take into consideration account age.

humanrebar 11y ago

I think the existence of the #nevertrump movement and the lack of downvote in presidential elections shows the need for a downvote button. To bring it back to social media, I think Facebook conversations are especially poor in quality and a way to politely disagree would be good for the site and, as facebook grows, good for discourse generally.

cm3 11y ago
As someone outside the US, I never understood the fixation on candidates, given that they can tell a lot but the ones who make policy are still the same think tanks, lobbyists and bureaucrats working in DC their whole life. Sure, Trump, may try to push through one or two bad things, but he doesn't control the direction of the ship at all. Without the crew of a sail ship on his side, as a metaphor, Trump can rant whatever he wants. It'll go down in the books just as the escapades of other POTUSes. What I'm getting at is that the important, life-changing stuff happens behind the curtains and POTUS is merely the pony to entertain the masses and sometimes represent the policy created by the large government body. There are thousands of things a POTUS was against but had to defend, because the POTUS was there to represent the whole in the form of someone approachable. To me this is all some weird psychological game used to manage the population, and I like to think humanity has enough experience/knowledge to aim for a reasonable world without stupidity and sentiment-based ruling. Every logician must be very sad at how the world is managed. In summary, who cares of Trump is POTUS, he'll be just another show piece without real control in a much more complex game of power dynamics. That said, if someone wants to filter trumpology, they can ignore or flag them in their personal SPAM filter and statistics will do the rest. If that doesn't work, I'm sure you can silence certain Facebook profiles for you personally, just like one doesn't attend certain social circles in the real life.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  I don't know. The DREAM act, the changes to the healthcare laws, stimulus-oriented recession recovery, the sequestration, digital surveillance, and the TPP are all very important and very much results of decisions of the President.