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The absolute votes? No. In fact most of my higher vote comments are lower in substance (because people won't read long/nuanced posts, they want short black & wh

The absolute votes? No. In fact most of my higher vote comments are lower in substance (because people won't read long/nuanced posts, they want short black & white answers). But it does irk me slightly when someone will -1 a comment without an explanation/response. I don't mind an active counter-view (heck, I may learn I was wrong!), it is the silent dismissal I cannot stand (and often seems knee-jerky when you criticize a sacred cow company/product). But like all complaints like this, I am a giant hypocrite and have downvoted comments without responding.

jonplackett 6y ago
Not the absolute votes exactly. I guess I mean more of an addiction to checking to see if people have replied. To see if you got an up or down vote - I also hate unexplained downvotes! I just want to know what their alt opinion was!
- pbronez 6y ago
  You have to check for replies aggressively or you can’t have a conversation, because the site doesn’t proactively notify you about responses. Is there a service to get push notifications for HN responses?
  - u801e 6y ago
    > You have to check for replies aggressively or you can’t have a conversation I've found the easiest way to do that is to click on your username on the front page, and then click on the comments link. Any replies to your comments will show up there. It's easier to check if you don't make a lot of new comments in different comment threads. What would be nice is if sites like HN and Reddit would offer a preview pane of the overall comment thread structure with all comments collapsed and had a visual indicator about which subthread contains new comments since the last time you checked. Then it would be much easier to find newer comments and join the conversation. That's part of the reason why threads on usenet would be active for months, but threads on Reddit and Hackernews aren't active for more than a few days.
    - krapp 6y ago
      >What would be nice is if sites like HN and Reddit would offer a preview pane of the overall comment thread structure with all comments collapsed and had a visual indicator about which subthread contains new comments since the last time you checked The Hacker News Comments Owl browser plugin does something like this[0], I highly recommend it. [0]https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl
Sebb767 6y ago
> In fact most of my higher vote comments are lower in substance (because people won't read long/nuanced posts, they want short black & white answers). Similarly to Reddit, hn karma seems to be a lot about timing. Getting in on a thread early and getting some quick votes yielded far more karma for me than anything else. I wouldn't necessarily say that larger comments are overly ignored (especially in the hn community); the time it takes to formulate and research them, combined with the delayed upvotes due to reading time, probably scews the average karma enough already.
- d-1 6y ago
  I actually don't care about the status/karma aspect of votes. Negative votes would be more constructive if reasons were given for it (aka feedback). Positive votes, what is their use even? A "seal of quality" granted by HN users or simply a measure of how interesting a post appears to the HN crowd? It's probably the latter. Hard to make judgments about the general quality of the post by vote counts alone. At least HN is not like the YouTube trending section where a lot of clickbaity videos appear. You will encounter titles like: "I ate nothing for 1 hour and this is what happened" "I bought $200,000 worth of bananas and now I'm broke (and sad, lost in an island full of monkeys barely scraping by)" "You won't believe this happened" "Do this one trick (and waste 10 min of your time)" "I almost got killed" I'm sure you even encountered fancier ones, but these are what came off the top of my head. How to get people hooked on our site long enough and make them watch ads? That's YouTube for you. HN is quite different and thank goodness it is.
valand 6y ago
I can relate about the silent downvote, it enables irresponsible cancellation. I wish HN introduced a new method to disagree. A counter-argument type comment, which when upvoted, will downvote the parent comments.

jonplackett 6y ago

Not the absolute votes exactly. I guess I mean more of an addiction to checking to see if people have replied. To see if you got an up or down vote - I also hate unexplained downvotes! I just want to know what their alt opinion was!

pbronez 6y ago
You have to check for replies aggressively or you can’t have a conversation, because the site doesn’t proactively notify you about responses. Is there a service to get push notifications for HN responses?
- u801e 6y ago
  > You have to check for replies aggressively or you can’t have a conversation I've found the easiest way to do that is to click on your username on the front page, and then click on the comments link. Any replies to your comments will show up there. It's easier to check if you don't make a lot of new comments in different comment threads. What would be nice is if sites like HN and Reddit would offer a preview pane of the overall comment thread structure with all comments collapsed and had a visual indicator about which subthread contains new comments since the last time you checked. Then it would be much easier to find newer comments and join the conversation. That's part of the reason why threads on usenet would be active for months, but threads on Reddit and Hackernews aren't active for more than a few days.
  - krapp 6y ago
    >What would be nice is if sites like HN and Reddit would offer a preview pane of the overall comment thread structure with all comments collapsed and had a visual indicator about which subthread contains new comments since the last time you checked The Hacker News Comments Owl browser plugin does something like this[0], I highly recommend it. [0]https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl https://github.com/insin/hn-comments-owl

Sebb767 6y ago

> In fact most of my higher vote comments are lower in substance (because people won't read long/nuanced posts, they want short black & white answers). Similarly to Reddit, hn karma seems to be a lot about timing. Getting in on a thread early and getting some quick votes yielded far more karma for me than anything else. I wouldn't necessarily say that larger comments are overly ignored (especially in the hn community); the time it takes to formulate and research them, combined with the delayed upvotes due to reading time, probably scews the average karma enough already.

d-1 6y ago
I actually don't care about the status/karma aspect of votes. Negative votes would be more constructive if reasons were given for it (aka feedback). Positive votes, what is their use even? A "seal of quality" granted by HN users or simply a measure of how interesting a post appears to the HN crowd? It's probably the latter. Hard to make judgments about the general quality of the post by vote counts alone. At least HN is not like the YouTube trending section where a lot of clickbaity videos appear. You will encounter titles like: "I ate nothing for 1 hour and this is what happened" "I bought $200,000 worth of bananas and now I'm broke (and sad, lost in an island full of monkeys barely scraping by)" "You won't believe this happened" "Do this one trick (and waste 10 min of your time)" "I almost got killed" I'm sure you even encountered fancier ones, but these are what came off the top of my head. How to get people hooked on our site long enough and make them watch ads? That's YouTube for you. HN is quite different and thank goodness it is.

valand 6y ago

I can relate about the silent downvote, it enables irresponsible cancellation. I wish HN introduced a new method to disagree. A counter-argument type comment, which when upvoted, will downvote the parent comments.