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On the HN front - I would like to see a discussion and then the implementation of measures to encourage meaningful discussion, discourage low-effort comments, b
by yawgmoth 10y ago
On the HN front - I would like to see a discussion and then the implementation of measures to encourage meaningful discussion, discourage low-effort comments, but also to discourage "negative lurking". Like other users noticed, there are a lot of lurkers -- some of which downvote and move along. Because frequently I do not understand why a post has been downvoted (my own or otherwise), I am discouraged from contributing. A byproduct of both negative lurking and the fact that HN has concluded itself to be an intelligent community is that some readers, including myself, feel judged by the score next to our comments. There is someone out there reasonably asking "why do you care?" but it is also important to acknowledge that this phenomenon exists. Part of the longevity of a user's participation is the willingness of the community to accept it.
- asperous 10y agoYou're not given the ability to downvote without reaching a certain karma threshold, so there are already some thoughts in place there.
- yawgmoth 10y agoIt actually seems worse to me that people who have been around to achieve that threshold (it's 500, right?) don't have exhibit the etiquette I'm asking for. They should know better, right?
- Schwolop 10y agoI'm going to respectfully disagree. Part of why I like HN is that meta-discussion of the "why did you downvote me?" and "downvoting because ..." are actively discouraged. Better to silently downvote and move on, which I do frequently for all many of reasons. This has next to no impact unless multiple readers do the same thing, at which point greying out comments serves the intended purpose of conveying that the community as a whole doesn't think the comment is valuable.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago"serves the intended purpose of conveying that the community as a whole doesn't think the comment is valuable." No, it says that more people downvoted it than upvoted it by a certain number of votes. Says nothing about the community as a whole which may have never seen the comment due to the downvotes.
- nsgoetz 10y agoMaybe just making the downvote button more like the "report" button on facebook. Force people to either select from a few common reasons, or leave a comment to explain their downvote. This could also gently enforce norms for what the downvote is for, since some people new to HN might not realize it isn't the same as reddit. Obviously there are details to iron out, but I think it would be helpful.
- DanBC 10y agoReddit and many subreddits have rules that downvoting should not be done for disagreement. HN has no such rule.
- WikipediasBad 10y agoI think that's because hacker news is actually smart and not delusional like reddit. On reddit it's a de facto disagree button but a de jure spam report button. It's like they are in denial of what 99% of users use it for or they just don't want to admit it and ignore that fact.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]