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One thing I would like to see get addressed is how a popular sentiment can get upvoted so much. I feel that this undermines the importance of making an insightf
by alexyim 16y ago
One thing I would like to see get addressed is how a popular sentiment can get upvoted so much. I feel that this undermines the importance of making an insightful or relevant comment. People can easily just speak the popular sentiment of the time and gain karma/have it highlighted.
However, this is an issue we can all try to address. Next time we see a comment that says "hackers rule", we can avoid being trigger happy about upvoting it but rather evaluate it in terms of its merits. As a corollary, I make it a focus of mine to upvote good comments that I disagree with, a particularly hard thing to do.
- jacquesm 16y agoIt's easy, see the 'points' as a value instead of an increment on vote. That way you evaluate a comment based on what you think it's worth. If it still has less points than what you think it is worth, vote it up, otherwise vote it down.
- pavs 16y agoAlso hero worshipping. This is one thing I absolutely can't stand in reddit and now I see that it is also very common here in HN. People seem to up-vote users with "high score/past reputation/YC funded member" on virtually any comment they leave, even if their comment contributes absolutely nothing to the discussion or just re-enforces whatever the hive mind believes in. Forget about trying to disagree with a popular HN poster without getting down-voted to oblivion. This is really sad. I think overall karma points should not be made public. Each comment should be judged by its own merit not by the "karma points" they have in the leader-board.
- kmfrk 16y agoI haven't really wrapped my head around the grounds for down-voting on HN. It seemed very rare - and proper - at first, but I am beginning to get that the, albeit few, who do it vote based on content and not form. In other words, they disagree with what a person is saying - sometimes vehemently - but the downvoted comment is still politely and somewhat cogently phrased. It's not as widespread as on reddit where there is widespread reputation-sniping going on, and many HN users tend to pick up on unfair downvotes and vote the comment up to counter it. It'll still deter some people, I guess.
- nkurz 16y agoBased on how much some of my comments bounce up and down, I don't think that the downvotes are done by only a few. But I think this is a good thing, and if anything we need more people eager to downvote poor quality submissions. I think the reason that HN has remained as usable as it has because it is actively policed for content quality. I don't see a way to check, but I'd guess that my upvote to downvote ratio is about 3:1. I try to vote up anything that would want to see more of on the site, whether I agree or disagree with the content. I try to mercilessly vote down snappy one liners, purposeless profanity, and dumb jokes. If anything, I'd say I vote primarily on form --- I'll support just about any content if it's well written and well intentioned.
- ww520 16y agoOh yes, blind upvotes based on the poster are the worst. It devalues the actual discussion. Power users in Digg are the main cause of its downfall. I hate to see HN is going that way.
- jacquesm 16y ago> Forget about trying to disagree with a popular HN poster without getting down-voted to oblivion. That's been a problem with HN for as long as it exists.
- flatline 16y agoAbout addressing this - does anyone know why you can't change a vote on HN? I've had several times where I meant to downvote specifically and upvoted instead by mistake; the buttons are very close together especially on a mobile device, but even on my desktop my finger has slipped.