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Who said it's mistakes? Sometimes you can just be making a wholly correct remark that goes against the grain. If you should be forced to "own" your downvotes,
by rusk 8y ago
Who said it's mistakes? Sometimes you can just be making a wholly correct remark that goes against the grain.
If you should be forced to "own" your downvotes, then downvoters should be forced to "own" them too by accompanying their downvote with an explanation.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"If you should be forced to "own" your downvotes, then downvoters should be forced to "own" them too by accompanying their downvote with an explanation. " Maybe the whole voting thing should be abandoned and comments should stand on their own. What's the benefit of karma?
- rusk 8y agoDon't get me wrong. Voting and Karma do have value. It's not a perfect system though.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago> What's the benefit of karma? Probable answer: so a venture capitalist firm that runs this place can: 1. Get a feel of what's coming 'in' and climbing in popularity. 2. To control the narrative by upvoting and/or downvoting submitters to control where the news goes. Transparency would indeed solve this. But it would also end those asymmetric benefits of controlling your own news agency/site.
- reitanqild 8y agoOn lobsters comment scores are public, downvotes has to specify a reason and moderation is public. Programming topics are probably better at lobsters. (And almost all other topics are off topic.)
- krapp 8y agoI don't know about the benefit of karma, but the purpose of karma is to enforce and reward conformity to guidelines and culture through operant conditioning, with the intended net effect being only high-quality comments (and commenters) wind up on top, and are engaged with, while low quality comments (and commenters) are left alone at the bottom, unreadable, to discourage both commenters and posters. This is in line with HN's culture of aggressive curation and "quality over quantity," though, so I don't see it changing or going away.