6 ms·

What forum rules would you like to see experiments with?

• Darkphibre 7y ago
  Not op, but one idea: Ask for an articulate reason for downvoting. Increases the barrier of downvotes, and if people don't feel that it's articulate they could then downvote the downvote (with their reasons why). Frequently downvoted reasons could be added to a blacklist that requires additional elucidation before being able to submit the downvote. This has been an interesting thought experiment. I'd expect the results might besimilar to Robot9000: https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-attacking-noise-in-chat/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-a...
  • loceng 7y ago
    If keeping down votes I like the idea of at least a minimum reply character length - those could then be added and act as comments.
  • phantarch 7y ago
    Additionally, you could rephrase from "downvote" to "rebuttal", which I think makes it more clear that not only is the opinion/post unpopular, but that there is information that contradicts the OP's post. It could make for a more substantive phrasing
  • vidarh 7y ago
    Slashdot has (had? Haven't used Slashdot for years) a reason for up/downvotes, coupled with meta-moderation where you would occasionally be asked to moderate someone elses choice of moderation. Don't remember how well it worked.
    • Darkphibre 7y ago
      Heck yeah! I had a five digit slashdot account and ICQ accounts. Those were the days. :)
• loceng 7y ago
  The easiest one would simply be removing the down vote mechanism. If with an existing site then can compare with the years' prior stats - assuming they've been recorded; I don't know if HN does. There are a number of things you could monitor - would be interesting to see if any sets of people with the same behaviour change their behaviour more than just down voting, like if they stay on the site more or less, if they comment more or less; perhaps doing word use analysis on these different sub sets before and after the down vote change, what language are people who are prone to down voting using vs. those who only comment or only up vote but don't down vote, etc.
  • aneesh297 7y ago
    So like Facebook or YouTube comments (downvotes on YouTube don't really do anything) ?
    • archontes 7y ago
      I think his point might be that a YouTube downvote really does do something; it creates in the downvoter an emotion that the point has been addressed and can be discarded without further thought.
    • rewq4321 7y ago
      Do you have evidence for this? It doesn't change the publicly displayed number, but I was under the impression that it does change the ordering. That did seem to be the case last time I experimented with this. On a video with only a dozen or so comments I downvoted a comment with no upvotes, and then opened the video page in an incognito tab, and the comment I downvoted was right at the bottom. Could have been a coincidence, but the probability of that seemed low at the time.
  • rytill 7y ago
    You’ve got an old and wise account, but for me, hacker news is a place I can’t downvote.
    • loceng 7y ago