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Random feedbackless downvoting is more and more being clearly abused to censor seemingly random and perfectly acceptable comments. The fact that talking about i
by infinity0 7y ago
Random feedbackless downvoting is more and more being clearly abused to censor seemingly random and perfectly acceptable comments. The fact that talking about it is against the site guidelines only makes the problem worse. HN needs to deal with this.
PG seems to understand that a community censorship mechanism needs safeguards. From http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html :
> I think it's important that a site that kills submissions provide a way for users to see what got killed if they want to. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. HN users can do this by flipping a switch called showdead in their profile.
How can editors be "kept honest" if a bunch of their minions can just downvote users for no reason and any complaining is forbidden?
- dhimes 7y agoit's not "minions." Way way way back in the early days of the board we actually discussed what downvotes should mean. Argument 1 was that a vote should only indicate whether or not you thought a comment contributed to the discussion- and not indicate agreement or disagreement. This gave an indicator with a single purpose. Argument 2 was that a vote could also be used to indicate disagreement. This made one indicator mean more than one thing. Some suggested a second vote- in order to keep the indicators clear on what they were reporting. pg eventually came down on the side of Argument 2, so voting can be either "I disagree" or "you comment is not useful." I do agree that adding a comment when downvoting is useful to the downvotee, but alas sometimes these come off as mean or supercilious and leave a bad tone in general, spoiling the conversation (or igniting a flame war).
- infinity0 7y agoMore and more often recently, I find downvoted comments that I thought are all perfectly useful and reasonable to the discussion. I in fact thought the downvotes were neither "useful" nor "contributing to the discussion". I would rather like to downvote the downvoters to reduce their karma and their power to perform these downvotes, but the only mechanic I have on HN to express my preference is to re-upvote the comment, which is not in fact its original intended purpose. Rather, I would like to ignore all downvotes made by particular downvoters because I believe their judgements are highly flawed, independent of the quality of the original comment that was downvoted. https://abstrusegoose.com/527 https://abstrusegoose.com/527 is highly relevant.
- dhimes 7y agoAgreed. And great link. The “your” seals it.