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Thanks, appreciate your response. Do you have any thoughts about the voting system on HN? Not that it's going to change, but I am becoming quite tired of seei

Thanks, appreciate your response. Do you have any thoughts about the voting system on HN? Not that it's going to change, but I am becoming quite tired of seeing worthwhile, interesting comments downvoted into grayness. It feels like a kind of anonymous shaming, like a group of people put on masks, gather around someone, and wag their fingers at them until they are shamed into silence. It only takes a few people to downvote a comment into obscurity, and it may happen by chance that the first few people to see it are censorious, preventing others who would upvote it from even seeing it. I strongly think that there should only be two options: upvote, or flag for rule violations.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
I'm not a fan, either. On the one hand, the voting system is very good at getting rid of bad comments. OTOH, more often than not, the comments that get downed aren't actually the right ones, and the right ones are violating the rules anyways, so downing them is pointless. Unfortunately, that would mean that not upvoting is now an implicit down... But yeah, voting systems in general aren't great: one of the worst comments I ever wrote got heavily upvoted, before dang (quite rightly) detached the subtree and chastised me. Voting systems encourage a site to move toward a circlejerk, as everybody vigourously agrees with each other, any dissent silenced. Every community is a little bit of a circlejerk, because communities are brought together through some kind of shared value. But if you full-on circlejerk, you're left with a boring echochamber, which doesn't challenge anybody intellectually, because everybody agrees. However, any alternatives to the voting system have their own problems (see 4chan): a good community doesn't succeed because of their thread ranking system: it succeeds in spite of it (see lainchan and HN). And yes, I put HN in the good group: despite how broken voting is (pretty much by design), HN works pretty well.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

I'm not a fan, either. On the one hand, the voting system is very good at getting rid of bad comments. OTOH, more often than not, the comments that get downed aren't actually the right ones, and the right ones are violating the rules anyways, so downing them is pointless. Unfortunately, that would mean that not upvoting is now an implicit down... But yeah, voting systems in general aren't great: one of the worst comments I ever wrote got heavily upvoted, before dang (quite rightly) detached the subtree and chastised me. Voting systems encourage a site to move toward a circlejerk, as everybody vigourously agrees with each other, any dissent silenced. Every community is a little bit of a circlejerk, because communities are brought together through some kind of shared value. But if you full-on circlejerk, you're left with a boring echochamber, which doesn't challenge anybody intellectually, because everybody agrees. However, any alternatives to the voting system have their own problems (see 4chan): a good community doesn't succeed because of their thread ranking system: it succeeds in spite of it (see lainchan and HN). And yes, I put HN in the good group: despite how broken voting is (pretty much by design), HN works pretty well.