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HN generally works very well. The echo chamber problem is due to allowing downvotes IMO. In my experience that simply leads to minority viewpoints being downvot

HN generally works very well. The echo chamber problem is due to allowing downvotes IMO. In my experience that simply leads to minority viewpoints being downvoted. Instead, downvotes should be removed, and people should be allowed to flag abusive comments.

civility 9y ago
On top of downvotes, you can say very toxic / abusive / condescending things and get away with it if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation. You can't bluntly refute or critique a questionable (but popular) argument without being accused of lacking civility...
- shawnee_ 9y ago
  > if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely. You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.
  - cpncrunch 9y ago
    Other areas where I see this happening on HN: - discussing the risks of psychoactive drugs. - pointing out flaws in overhyped press releases about the next wonder drug/treatment I guess you're right that you can avoid getting downvoted by being exceptionally polite and spending about 15 minutes crafting a response saying "crap science, uncontrolled trial, possible placebo effect", but sometimes I just don't have the time and energy for that. I'd prefer it if people here didn't automatically assume I'm full of shit when I point out a flaw in an argument without writing my response absolutely perfectly the first time.
  - dang 9y ago
    > "You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company." People say negative things on HN about YC companies all the time. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is at issue. That doesn't mean we don't moderate it at all—that would leave too much of a loophole—but we do moderate it less. This is literally the first principle that we tell everyone who moderates Hacker News. You can find many posts I've written about this over the years via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20moderate%20less%20yc https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
    - shawnee_ 9y ago
      Thanks for the reply. What I meant, is that one cannot start a discussion of such things without being willing to lose lots of points and karma. Observations that AirBnB might be doing more harm than good to cities having "housing crisis" issues, and the fact that Uber and Lyft are actually harming public transportation rider numbers and putting more automobiles on the roads (creating congestion). Two issues I've seen brought up here that get downvoted into oblivion. Why risk that? It's far easier for people to jump on the "attack the poster" bandwagon... as they have done to me in this thread. Granted, I've been reading HN for over 11 years now, and the site is not the same as it used to be. A lot of interesting posters have left. Probably I need to lower my expectations for what to see when I come here.
      - dang 9y ago
        It's hard to say why specific comments have been downvoted. Often it's because they break the site guidelines in ways the author didn't notice. Sometimes it's simply not fair, and other users need to (and often do) fix that by giving a corrective upvote. Plenty of comments arguing that Airbnb/Uber might be doing more harm than good routinely get heavily upvoted, so I'd question your overall generalization.
mancerayder 9y ago
I think the Hackernews' "echo-chamber-ness" is extremely exaggerated. It only feels like that if you're in the minority viewpoint in a thread (which happens to me, too). However, it's not echo-chambery if dissident viewpoints live side-by-side dominant viewpoints, even if the latter are 80% of the thread replies and upvotes. An echo chamber is arguably more when we actively suppress dissident viewpoints. Reddit is infamous for moderators doing that simply by deleting comments under some pretext of 'spirit of the subreddit' or such. With Facebook there's a first-and-last-name-and-picture-visible shaming that can be scary and damaging, repulsing the opposite viewpoints. At a more extreme, you can help foster an echo chamber by organizing a large group of people to scream and picket and threaten a speaker that has the wrong views, reminding all the others of what happens. HN to me is an oasis. Even if I get downvoted when I have a minority view. I still feel as if intelligent arguments are considered. With Reddit, how many intelligent comments are there? The English grammar alone is awful, full of shortcuts, cliches and new millennial-speak. But worse: the responses are short. One-liners. And even worse: argumentation is ad-hominem and emotive. In summary, I think Reddit is about emotional expression, and HN is about (an attempt of) rigor and rationality.
- adamrezich 9y ago
  I've seen a lot of very interesting, usually quite short comments on politics-related threads in the past few weeks, that were posted less than ten minutes prior and already grayed out and marked "[dead]". In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all, yet HN was implicitly saying "yeah we're not going to allow discussion on this topic." I'm sure there's Very Good Reasons(TM) for this but it always feels like wasted opportunity for interesting, out-of-the-box discussion.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all, Downvotes are not only for inflammatory language; a comment can be a negative contribution to the signal-to-noise ratio, and even violate the commenting guidelines, without using inflammatory language.
  - 9y ago
jjrh 9y ago
The real issue is binary choice. I might disagree with a comment, but acknowledge it's a valid well thought out argument. On the flip side I might agree but acknowledge it's a poorly formed argument. Something might be totally off topic or funny, but if I made me laugh do I down vote it? Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea I think and allowed one to filter out the 'funny' or 'offtopic' comments.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > I might disagree with a comment, but acknowledge it's a valid well thought out argument. So, upvotes and respond. If it's a net positive contribution, you shouldn't be downvoting. > Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea Its a good model for a customizable user experience, and a bad model for a community. Those two goals are often opposed.
  - ecommerceguy 9y ago
    I disagree. Upvoting is like a High 5, downvoting, especially on Reddit, is used to bury something people don't agree with. Downvotes, IMO, should require some sort of intellectual effort as to why you are actively burying a comment or post and thus require a reply. Dragon, you commented and downvoted on something that you are doing right now which is commenting on a comment system. No? At least you had the decency to reply, which most Redditors don't. Which makes Reddit Toxic.
- zaarn 9y ago
  I never downvote a comment, reddit or here, simply because I disgree. I find such behaviour (subjectively) wrong since it does not encourage discussion in an open, civilized manner (on reddit, all that happens is that you get 30 comments deep and you just downvote eachother's comments to 0 while being increasingly aggressive). I reserve downvotes for when a comment is being needlessly toxic, doesn't contribute to the discussion or otherwise not helpful for an open discussion. I think the best cure for "downvote to disagree" is to firmly hold to the principle that the opposing side of the argument has the best intentions to the extend of their knowledge and that at the end of the discussion, all participants should have learned something. You should also always be willing to change your mind on what you argue about. Always.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
HN works very poorly, and worse by the year. I've been using HN since 2009, I've been on a wide variety of discussion platforms going back to usenet, HN has had its moment in the sun and that has largely passed. Voting on HN barely has an effect, and I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year. People just don't vote on posts as often as you'd think, not anymore. A related problem is that commentary doesn't go on for very long. In the usenet days you could have a good thread that would last for months and months that would continue to spawn good and interesting commentary, a flash in the pan thread might only last a few days. On HN the window of commentary for a post is rarely more than a day and typically only a matter of hours. It's just people strafing comments into the void and then disengaging. Long comments typically don't get read, and don't get upvoted, don't get commented on, etc, for example.
- sctb 9y ago
  > ...I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year OK, I'll bite! A cursory look at the data shows a clear increase in average votes on comments from 2007 until 2012, which is the only year with a dip, followed by steady growth until the present all-time high.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Huh. Is this total votes or votes per comment? I'm curious what the median number of total votes on comments that have at least one vote is.
    - waterhouse 9y ago
      I wonder if (or how) one should take population into account, too. We might figure that a majority of the people read only threads that are on the frontpage, so, if the number of people on HN has doubled, then each thread will get viewed by 2x as many people, and, if the new crowd has the same likelihood of voting on each comment as the old crowd, then you'd expect 2x as many votes, assuming no change in comment quality. Instead you might want "votes per comment, divided by number of users". Of course, there are lots of "all else being equal" implicit assumptions there. First, if the population doubles but stories move off the frontpage in 0.7x the time, then you'd only get 1.4x as many votes—and this is one of InclinedPlane's points. Second, the newer crowd could be significantly more, or significantly less, active. To control for these two things, the measure you might use instead is "votes per comment per pageview", or "votes per comment per second a user spends on the page". Third, there might be more comments posted—well, duh, it would be weird if the new users never posted any comments. Fourth—and I think this another thing InclinedPlane wants to focus on—comment quality could have changed. Comment sorting is relevant too, because I'm sure lots of users don't read everything. If we suppose that, due to an increase in population, we get 2x as many comments but they have the same quality distribution, and if we suppose the best comments always go to the top, then the average quality of the top n comments should increase; you can see something like this in extremely popular Reddit threads, where the top several highly upvoted comments are clearly optimized for something (often clever jokes). If we suppose a decent population of users only read the top n comments, and always use the same function that maps "quality of a comment" to "probability of upvoting", then, when the set of comments doubles and (by assumption) the best rise to the top, we'd expect these users to generate more upvotes overall, and hence "average votes per comment viewed" should go up. (It's also possible that people's standards would rise. But I think people's changing standards would lag behind the changes in what they're viewing.) That said, for the comments that aren't in the top n, the fraction of people that view them (and consequently might comment on them) would go down. The question of how long threads sit on the frontpage is relevant, both for comment exposure and for InclinedPlane's point about conversation longevity. (There are also pages like "new" and the no-longer-linked-at-the-top "best".) I wonder how best to quantify that... perhaps "the frontpage tenure of the thread with the longest tenure of all threads on that day".
forapurpose 9y ago
> HN generally works very well After reading a few discussions over the last few days, I was thinking to my self that HN was better than ever, and very good (with one serious shortcoming). Even the echo chamber is much better than I remember. EDIT: The shortcoming, IMHO, is the abandonment of politics. HN is the ideal place to solve that problem, with s sophisticated audience open to and interested in experimentation and in problem solving. The goal of propagandists is not to persuade you, but to paralyze you; to shut down real discussion and debate. HN is, unwittingly, capitulating and cooperating with them. HN is another success for them.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The shortcoming, IMHO, is the abandonment of politics. HN is the ideal place to solve that problem No, it's really not, as HN demonstrates most of the time it interacts with politics.
- dang 9y ago
  > HN is the ideal place to solve that problem That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443431
  - forapurpose 9y ago
    Thanks for responding. > That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here That implies that it's an unsolvable problem, if I understand correctly. There's no reason to think this problem is any more difficult than all the other 'unsolvable' ones and this one is particularly, I would even say 'extremely' valuable to work on. I don't believe we simply could introduce political topics and it would work due to some HN magic. It would take serious work and experimentation to find a solution, but I think HN is better suited than other places to do that work. And a solution could change discourse in the country and the world, at a time when discourse on the Internet problems SV has invented has become a very dangerous weapon for some, and is tearing society apart. I realize that "we" means you and sctb more than anyone, and so it's a request and encouragement. I still think it's the most valuable thing HN could do, potentially world-changing. Previous generations had books and leaders that changed the course of history; this time it might be software or a software-based technique that turns the tide. I hope that at least you will keep it in mind.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Well... downvotes are definitely abused. They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement, and they are. All. The. Time. And it stinks to be on the receiving end of that. But I'm not sure that they should be eliminated. The alternative is to leave moderation as the only way to deal with bad (abusive, off-topic, trolling, unintelligible) posts. I'm not sure that having people flag every bad post they think they see, and letting the moderators sort it out, is really the optimal way to do things.
- dang 9y ago
  > They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement That's a common misconception. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN. It's a bit like how in Canada we think we have Miranda rights because we've seen it on American TV.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I would argue that while it's totally okay to do it, I'd find it better if people used it less for simply disagreeing. In my experience, the resulting discussion ends up being of poorer quality because of it (and less exposure due to being pushed down and hidden once it hits a certain threshold)
    - DanBC 9y ago
      Sure, but people have been saying that on HN for many years. I think you have more success if you ask everyone else to upvote unfairly downvoted comments.
      - zaarn 9y ago
        I try to do that, yes, though I always (wrongfully) hope that people change...
    - 9y ago

civility 9y ago

On top of downvotes, you can say very toxic / abusive / condescending things and get away with it if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation. You can't bluntly refute or critique a questionable (but popular) argument without being accused of lacking civility...

shawnee_ 9y ago
> if you share the "correct" viewpoint, but unpopular views have to be exceptionally polite to avoid biased moderation Where HN has been falling short (lately, in my observation) is where discussions about the ethics of certain business models get lost via the "buried" option or killed off completely. You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company. The voting rings will literally send your comment or post to the void: buried or killed off completely. HN does still post lots of interesting links, but for truly interesting discussion that isn't (for lack of a better word), tainted by bias, I prefer Reddit these days.
- cpncrunch 9y ago
  Other areas where I see this happening on HN: - discussing the risks of psychoactive drugs. - pointing out flaws in overhyped press releases about the next wonder drug/treatment I guess you're right that you can avoid getting downvoted by being exceptionally polite and spending about 15 minutes crafting a response saying "crap science, uncontrolled trial, possible placebo effect", but sometimes I just don't have the time and energy for that. I'd prefer it if people here didn't automatically assume I'm full of shit when I point out a flaw in an argument without writing my response absolutely perfectly the first time.
- dang 9y ago
  > "You cannot come to HN to discuss the potentially-negative ecological or economical impact of a YC company." People say negative things on HN about YC companies all the time. We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC-funded startup is at issue. That doesn't mean we don't moderate it at all—that would leave too much of a loophole—but we do moderate it less. This is literally the first principle that we tell everyone who moderates Hacker News. You can find many posts I've written about this over the years via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20moderate%20less%20yc https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
  - shawnee_ 9y ago
    Thanks for the reply. What I meant, is that one cannot start a discussion of such things without being willing to lose lots of points and karma. Observations that AirBnB might be doing more harm than good to cities having "housing crisis" issues, and the fact that Uber and Lyft are actually harming public transportation rider numbers and putting more automobiles on the roads (creating congestion). Two issues I've seen brought up here that get downvoted into oblivion. Why risk that? It's far easier for people to jump on the "attack the poster" bandwagon... as they have done to me in this thread. Granted, I've been reading HN for over 11 years now, and the site is not the same as it used to be. A lot of interesting posters have left. Probably I need to lower my expectations for what to see when I come here.
    - dang 9y ago
      It's hard to say why specific comments have been downvoted. Often it's because they break the site guidelines in ways the author didn't notice. Sometimes it's simply not fair, and other users need to (and often do) fix that by giving a corrective upvote. Plenty of comments arguing that Airbnb/Uber might be doing more harm than good routinely get heavily upvoted, so I'd question your overall generalization.

mancerayder 9y ago

I think the Hackernews' "echo-chamber-ness" is extremely exaggerated. It only feels like that if you're in the minority viewpoint in a thread (which happens to me, too). However, it's not echo-chambery if dissident viewpoints live side-by-side dominant viewpoints, even if the latter are 80% of the thread replies and upvotes. An echo chamber is arguably more when we actively suppress dissident viewpoints. Reddit is infamous for moderators doing that simply by deleting comments under some pretext of 'spirit of the subreddit' or such. With Facebook there's a first-and-last-name-and-picture-visible shaming that can be scary and damaging, repulsing the opposite viewpoints. At a more extreme, you can help foster an echo chamber by organizing a large group of people to scream and picket and threaten a speaker that has the wrong views, reminding all the others of what happens. HN to me is an oasis. Even if I get downvoted when I have a minority view. I still feel as if intelligent arguments are considered. With Reddit, how many intelligent comments are there? The English grammar alone is awful, full of shortcuts, cliches and new millennial-speak. But worse: the responses are short. One-liners. And even worse: argumentation is ad-hominem and emotive. In summary, I think Reddit is about emotional expression, and HN is about (an attempt of) rigor and rationality.

adamrezich 9y ago
I've seen a lot of very interesting, usually quite short comments on politics-related threads in the past few weeks, that were posted less than ten minutes prior and already grayed out and marked "[dead]". In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all, yet HN was implicitly saying "yeah we're not going to allow discussion on this topic." I'm sure there's Very Good Reasons(TM) for this but it always feels like wasted opportunity for interesting, out-of-the-box discussion.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > In each instance, the user was not using inflammatory language at all, Downvotes are not only for inflammatory language; a comment can be a negative contribution to the signal-to-noise ratio, and even violate the commenting guidelines, without using inflammatory language.
- 9y ago

jjrh 9y ago

The real issue is binary choice. I might disagree with a comment, but acknowledge it's a valid well thought out argument. On the flip side I might agree but acknowledge it's a poorly formed argument. Something might be totally off topic or funny, but if I made me laugh do I down vote it? Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea I think and allowed one to filter out the 'funny' or 'offtopic' comments.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> I might disagree with a comment, but acknowledge it's a valid well thought out argument. So, upvotes and respond. If it's a net positive contribution, you shouldn't be downvoting. > Slashdot's model of tagging posts was a pretty good idea Its a good model for a customizable user experience, and a bad model for a community. Those two goals are often opposed.
- ecommerceguy 9y ago
  I disagree. Upvoting is like a High 5, downvoting, especially on Reddit, is used to bury something people don't agree with. Downvotes, IMO, should require some sort of intellectual effort as to why you are actively burying a comment or post and thus require a reply. Dragon, you commented and downvoted on something that you are doing right now which is commenting on a comment system. No? At least you had the decency to reply, which most Redditors don't. Which makes Reddit Toxic.
zaarn 9y ago
I never downvote a comment, reddit or here, simply because I disgree. I find such behaviour (subjectively) wrong since it does not encourage discussion in an open, civilized manner (on reddit, all that happens is that you get 30 comments deep and you just downvote eachother's comments to 0 while being increasingly aggressive). I reserve downvotes for when a comment is being needlessly toxic, doesn't contribute to the discussion or otherwise not helpful for an open discussion. I think the best cure for "downvote to disagree" is to firmly hold to the principle that the opposing side of the argument has the best intentions to the extend of their knowledge and that at the end of the discussion, all participants should have learned something. You should also always be willing to change your mind on what you argue about. Always.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

HN works very poorly, and worse by the year. I've been using HN since 2009, I've been on a wide variety of discussion platforms going back to usenet, HN has had its moment in the sun and that has largely passed. Voting on HN barely has an effect, and I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year. People just don't vote on posts as often as you'd think, not anymore. A related problem is that commentary doesn't go on for very long. In the usenet days you could have a good thread that would last for months and months that would continue to spawn good and interesting commentary, a flash in the pan thread might only last a few days. On HN the window of commentary for a post is rarely more than a day and typically only a matter of hours. It's just people strafing comments into the void and then disengaging. Long comments typically don't get read, and don't get upvoted, don't get commented on, etc, for example.

sctb 9y ago
> ...I suspect that the average votes per comment on HN has gone way down year over year OK, I'll bite! A cursory look at the data shows a clear increase in average votes on comments from 2007 until 2012, which is the only year with a dip, followed by steady growth until the present all-time high.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Huh. Is this total votes or votes per comment? I'm curious what the median number of total votes on comments that have at least one vote is.
  - waterhouse 9y ago
    I wonder if (or how) one should take population into account, too. We might figure that a majority of the people read only threads that are on the frontpage, so, if the number of people on HN has doubled, then each thread will get viewed by 2x as many people, and, if the new crowd has the same likelihood of voting on each comment as the old crowd, then you'd expect 2x as many votes, assuming no change in comment quality. Instead you might want "votes per comment, divided by number of users". Of course, there are lots of "all else being equal" implicit assumptions there. First, if the population doubles but stories move off the frontpage in 0.7x the time, then you'd only get 1.4x as many votes—and this is one of InclinedPlane's points. Second, the newer crowd could be significantly more, or significantly less, active. To control for these two things, the measure you might use instead is "votes per comment per pageview", or "votes per comment per second a user spends on the page". Third, there might be more comments posted—well, duh, it would be weird if the new users never posted any comments. Fourth—and I think this another thing InclinedPlane wants to focus on—comment quality could have changed. Comment sorting is relevant too, because I'm sure lots of users don't read everything. If we suppose that, due to an increase in population, we get 2x as many comments but they have the same quality distribution, and if we suppose the best comments always go to the top, then the average quality of the top n comments should increase; you can see something like this in extremely popular Reddit threads, where the top several highly upvoted comments are clearly optimized for something (often clever jokes). If we suppose a decent population of users only read the top n comments, and always use the same function that maps "quality of a comment" to "probability of upvoting", then, when the set of comments doubles and (by assumption) the best rise to the top, we'd expect these users to generate more upvotes overall, and hence "average votes per comment viewed" should go up. (It's also possible that people's standards would rise. But I think people's changing standards would lag behind the changes in what they're viewing.) That said, for the comments that aren't in the top n, the fraction of people that view them (and consequently might comment on them) would go down. The question of how long threads sit on the frontpage is relevant, both for comment exposure and for InclinedPlane's point about conversation longevity. (There are also pages like "new" and the no-longer-linked-at-the-top "best".) I wonder how best to quantify that... perhaps "the frontpage tenure of the thread with the longest tenure of all threads on that day".

forapurpose 9y ago

> HN generally works very well After reading a few discussions over the last few days, I was thinking to my self that HN was better than ever, and very good (with one serious shortcoming). Even the echo chamber is much better than I remember. EDIT: The shortcoming, IMHO, is the abandonment of politics. HN is the ideal place to solve that problem, with s sophisticated audience open to and interested in experimentation and in problem solving. The goal of propagandists is not to persuade you, but to paralyze you; to shut down real discussion and debate. HN is, unwittingly, capitulating and cooperating with them. HN is another success for them.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> The shortcoming, IMHO, is the abandonment of politics. HN is the ideal place to solve that problem No, it's really not, as HN demonstrates most of the time it interacts with politics.
dang 9y ago
> HN is the ideal place to solve that problem That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16443431
- forapurpose 9y ago
  Thanks for responding. > That's an illusion, for reasons I attempted to describe here That implies that it's an unsolvable problem, if I understand correctly. There's no reason to think this problem is any more difficult than all the other 'unsolvable' ones and this one is particularly, I would even say 'extremely' valuable to work on. I don't believe we simply could introduce political topics and it would work due to some HN magic. It would take serious work and experimentation to find a solution, but I think HN is better suited than other places to do that work. And a solution could change discourse in the country and the world, at a time when discourse on the Internet problems SV has invented has become a very dangerous weapon for some, and is tearing society apart. I realize that "we" means you and sctb more than anyone, and so it's a request and encouragement. I still think it's the most valuable thing HN could do, potentially world-changing. Previous generations had books and leaders that changed the course of history; this time it might be software or a software-based technique that turns the tide. I hope that at least you will keep it in mind.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

Well... downvotes are definitely abused. They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement, and they are. All. The. Time. And it stinks to be on the receiving end of that. But I'm not sure that they should be eliminated. The alternative is to leave moderation as the only way to deal with bad (abusive, off-topic, trolling, unintelligible) posts. I'm not sure that having people flag every bad post they think they see, and letting the moderators sort it out, is really the optimal way to do things.

dang 9y ago
> They're not supposed to be used to express disagreement That's a common misconception. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314 I think people have the wrong idea about HN downvotes because they think Reddit rules apply to HN. It's a bit like how in Canada we think we have Miranda rights because we've seen it on American TV.
- zaarn 9y ago
  I would argue that while it's totally okay to do it, I'd find it better if people used it less for simply disagreeing. In my experience, the resulting discussion ends up being of poorer quality because of it (and less exposure due to being pushed down and hidden once it hits a certain threshold)
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Sure, but people have been saying that on HN for many years. I think you have more success if you ask everyone else to upvote unfairly downvoted comments.
    - zaarn 9y ago
      I try to do that, yes, though I always (wrongfully) hope that people change...
  - 9y ago