14 ms·

I Downvoted Because

118 points by vincent_s 6y ago

tchalla 6y ago
I have long been a proponent of using upvotes to increase the signal over downvotes to reduce the noise.
- bak3y 6y ago
  As long as upvotes can be manipulated (multiple accounts/bots) then having downvotes in places to reduce noise is necessary IMHO
warpech 6y ago
It has a passive-aggressive feel similar to LMGTFY. It would feel less like it, if there were some ready made text one-liners with a compassionate summary and a link to the longer version. Also, if you want to help - why would you downvote? Just help!
- shawnz 6y ago
  I think it ought to be the commenter's job to write the compassionate summary tailored to the situation.
  - suprfsat 6y ago
    It ought to be the newbie's job to write what the problem is in complete sentences and not post screenshots of code, but we can't have everything.
    - jxf 6y ago
      Being new means you might not know you need to do that, though.
      - rc-1140 6y ago
        Complete sentences shouldn't be a foreign concept for people new to programming. I personally don't agree with the spirit of the parent comment, but I agree with the letter: it's ridiculous seeing half-formed sentences and screenshots with bumbling red-line diagrams made in the Windows Snipping Tool that somehow already have jpeg artifacts. ESL is a separate problem.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Which removes the last shred of utility the linked site might have. (which is totally fine)
    - shawnz 6y ago
      Not necessarily, it could help to address common counterarguments
- aloisdg 6y ago
  I don't have the time for that and I don't want someone else to loose human time for this. Why would we if OP didn't?
- pelliphant 6y ago
  The reasons listed are grouped as "code review" or "stack overflow", places where I would usually want to help, and having a list of pre-written mistakes to copy-paste might be usefull. But the first half of the webpage only talk about communities in general, so I first assumed this was meant to be used on places like hackernews and reddit, places where downvotes most of the time mean: "you are an idiot/troll, I'm downvoting this to save other people from having to read this garbage." A situation where I really don't want to help the poster...
bovermyer 6y ago
I feel that both upvotes and downvotes have a negative effect on conversation, but having seen way too many "me too" and "+1" replies to things on other platforms, I can't really think of a good replacement.
- kuroguro 6y ago
  I feel like github's emotes (thumbs up etc) are good enough if you don't want a full blown upvote/downvote system.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    There's also the SoylentNews approach, based on the Slashdot approach. Positive scores are capped at +5, negative scores are capped at -1 (iirc), a reason must always be selected for a positive vote (e.g. Insightful) or a negative vote (e.g. Flamebait), and you also have the option of neutral votes (+0 Agree and -0 Disagree).
  - jonfw 6y ago
    I like these on slack as well, and it's particularly nice that they're almost always positive or celebratory
- martin_a 6y ago
  Clear rules and an active moderation can help solve this. If posters of "me too"-answers will receive negative feedback for those kind of posts, they will probably stop. Maybe an idea for YouGotBlockedBecau.se/me-too ;-)
- falcolas 6y ago
  Perhaps a like/dislike button pair that just adds a single EM height bar in the thread with your username and a + or -, without moving comments around otherwise. It could be collapsable, with a "overview" of likes/dislikes.
- zug_zug 6y ago
  Really? This is inconceivable to me. I think they are essential for sorting good comments from bad. Here's an experiment -- Try reading your next HN thread from bottom (most downvoted) to top, and see if it's an equal experience. I find that any service that doesn't do vote-ranking (e.g. newspaper forums) usually turns atrocious almost immediately.
bochoh 6y ago
I like the system here where you cannot downvote until a certain aging process has occurred. Granted I’m not there yet, but not being able to downvote doesn’t impede the value I find on HN.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  500 karma is the threshold.
  - Ajedi32 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, is all this stuff documented anywhere? I've been on HN for years now and I had no idea what that threshold was set at. Heck, I'm not even sure I fully understand how basic features like flagging work.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  HN has a lot of similar design choices in that respect that I've grown to like over time. For example: 1. You can't downvote direct replies to your own comments 2. You can't see comment scores other than your own 3. Heavily down voted comments aren't hidden, just greyed out 4. New comments are initially sorted near the top of the thread, so they aren't immediately buried and have a chance to get voted on 5. Comments on older threads can't be downvoted
  - SilasX 6y ago
    >You can't see comment scores other than your own I wish you could also see the scores of direct replies to your comments, so you know if the replies are popular and merit being addressed. As it stands now, if you see 2+ replies, and they aren't greyed out or responded to, you have no idea if they're heavily upvoted, or just got ignored.
pdevr 6y ago
I just thought of this. I made a comment about a certain technology being double-edged and saw a couple of down votes. I really would have loved to know what caused the ire and have a polite discussion with the person. Suggestion: Technical forums have more than code being discussed. You may want to add categories or groups. Idea/HN feature wishlist: When you downvote a comment, you can add a reason right there. When you hover on any comment which was downvoted, you can see the reasons why it was downvoted.
- jawns 6y ago
  Your proposal sounds similar to the flagging mechanism on many online forums, where the person who flags the comment is asked to specify a reason so it can be triaged by a moderator. In the case of downvoting, it doesn't rise to the level of needing to be triaged by a mod, but I suppose you could argue that by giving the commenter a signal about why you downvoted, you're allowing them to self-triage (e.g. update the post to address the issue, or at least try to do better next time). Being able to choose from a short list of predefined downvote reasons -- even if it were between "This breaks forum rules" versus "I simply disagree" -- would be useful.
  - pdevr 6y ago
    So the comment stating the reason for downvoting is meant for the person whose post was downvoted, even though everyone can see it. Yes, as you said, I guess it will be a type of opportunity to self-triage - in a public way. It will also (hopefully) make the person who downvotes pause and think about the reason for downvoting. Edit: typo/words
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  This would be a great feature, it would definitely help users grow and become more self-aware. I would welcome it.
Communitivity 6y ago
I think this is a great idea. I can think of four possible improvements: 1) Require a selection of one of the reasons when a downvote occurs (require HN cooperation & implementation) 2) Add a similar capability for upvoting reasons 3) Require a selection of one of the reasons when an upvote occurs 4) Add a 'save this' feature to HN, so an upvote is not used as a bookmark to quickly search HN posts you wanted to find again.
- samizdis 6y ago
  I use the "favorite" feature to save/bookmark HN posts.
  - jjice 6y ago
    I'd love a "favorite" or "save" for comments too.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      It exists, you just have to be looking at the comment exclusively. Click on the timestamp next to the poster's name, and the 'favorite' button will be on the page.
    - samizdis 6y ago
      You can already "favorite" comments. Click on the "n minutes ago" link next to the commenter's name and you get the option. To view favorited submissions/comments, click your user name to go to your profile info. The links to favorited submissions and comments are there.
      - Communitivity 6y ago
        Thank you to the folks who told me about favorite option. I would say then that my request would be that favorite is a link with the main set up links under the post entry on the main page, rather than just on the page for that post.
anonunivgrad 6y ago
The only substitute for a mob-mentality-enforcing downvote system is human moderation by heroes who can withstand such pressure and biases.
dmitshur 6y ago
My current strategy is to never downvote (not counting the rare accidental misclicks that I don’t know about). Instead, I try to upvote other things that deserve to stand out. Leaving something at 0 upvotes is still a signal, although it’s less distinguishable from “no one saw this”. This approach makes the decision of voting binary (to upvote or not) rather than one with 3 choices, which reduces mental overhead. It also allows me to focus on positivity and finding comments that provide value, and pay less attention to ones that don’t. In the end, I think there can be value in downvoting, but I personally just don’t feel that the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.
- undecisive 6y ago
  I mostly feel the same, but I think there are differences in context - for example: - HN: Some really repugnant attitudes from time to time need to be downvoted. For example, personal attacks and things that would have been moderated out of existence on other platforms. - Stack Overflow et al: Answers that are objectively and dangerously wrong. And I don't mean answers that just misread the question - those actually might be useful for someone else who stumbled on the page looking for exactly that thing. I mean answers that are dangerous, vulnerable, misleading, or represent an extreme viewpoint as fact ("buhh object orientation is dangerous, you must write C++ using functional paradigms, it's the only way to make good programs") I worry that if stuff like this doesn't get downvoted by some, these things will be considered valid - or even acceptable - by others.
  - js8 6y ago
    "Answers that are objectively and dangerously wrong." I don't think anybody reading an Internet discussion has so little time not to add to the downvote: "This part of your comment is horribly wrong, I warn others against doing it." Actually, I think I would be more convinced to be careful with that sentence than just seeing bunch of downvotes.
    - undecisive 6y ago
      Absolutely. Usually there's no problem in doing both (hence, I guess, the OP) But commenting without downvoting skews the ordering algorithms, and of course if someone else has already made a similar enough comment that you wouldn't be adding materially to the conversation, adding a similar comment just makes the post look busy an therefore, potentially, interesting.
arbitrage 6y ago
You could just communicate with words, like an adult though?
- classified 6y ago
  The grey text color of your comment seems to suggest that there is at least one HN member with at least 500 karma (hence the ability to downvote) who finds the mere mention of such an outrageous imposition to be worth a downvote. How dare you insinuate we could act like grown-ups?
  - FalconSensei 6y ago
    The greyed out text color of your comment proves you are right!
DoreenMichele 6y ago
Good lord. You know, a lot of downvotes are rooted in "You and I come from vastly different backgrounds and will probably never see eye to eye" and it's a giant, giant, humongous, painful can of worms to dig around in that. A downvote (or ten) is the least painful way to let very different people "say" things like "Wow. I think you are stupid because I'm a racist/misogynist/classist asshole and the way you said it tells me you are the wrong color/a woman/poor." or "I'm from a different country or culture or religion and, good, god, there is so much baked in implicit assumptions that it would take weeks, months or years to sort out why we don't agree." I mean, if you participate regularly and remain civil, some of that may get sorted over time. But it's not going to get sorted today because you submitted the downvote equivalent of a "bug report." Downvotes are annoying. And they are often kind of like that saying about democracy: "the worst thing ever....except for all the other options." (Edit: I wish there were a word that meant simultaneously misogynist and/or misandrist. I don't mean to suggest it's just "men hating on women." (if only because plenty of women hate on other women) I just have been up all night and I'm failing to find the elegant way to say that in a more gender neutral or even-handed way. Sorry 'bout that.)
- lrossi 6y ago
  > I wish there were a word that meant simultaneously misogynist and/or misandrist You mean “sexist”?
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Misanthrope is sometimes the correct word for what I'm talking about. But have an upvote.
  - effable 6y ago
    I don't want to be nitpicky but I am sorry I have to be: Is that feeling not better expressed by "misanthrope"?
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      Misanthropy is more generalized. And even a misanthrope will engage with people of the opposite sex in lively (though, IME, very depressing) debates, and even be respectful within that context. Many misanthropes I've known will even respect people who are well-educated or otherwise "successful" (by some measure). Most sexists won't. Similar to racists.
csours 6y ago
I like the idea, but the title feels aggressive. I'm no psychometrist, but when people feel like they are being attacked, they don't respond in a positive way. Downvotes may be feedback, but they don't feel like it.
martin_a 6y ago
This is probably the best: https://idownvotedbecau.se/noattempt/ https://idownvotedbecau.se/noattempt/ I'm barely active on StackOverflow anymore, because posters show less and less effort. I'm somewhat of a senior WordPress developer and eager to help, but the sheer amount of absolute basic stuff, without any effort made by the poster, just kills it for me. And it's not even the "can you recommend a plugin"-questions, but those which show that somebody has been given a task (or took it by themselves) without knowing anything at all. It's like getting into a car and then asking what that round thing right in front of you is for. I just downvote and flag those questions. I think nobody should answer those questions at all and we have to discourage behaviour where people, without any knowlede and effort, try to collect breadcrumbs to (somehow) reach a goal without even trying to understand the bigger picture. edit: Why the bigger picture is important? Because we are talking about systems that are, in most cases, facing the internet. And the internet is a hostile place where attacks against your systems are starting right after setting them up. It's ultimately important to know what you are doing and what the consequences are (or could be) when you start tinkering with theme files, "how WooCommerce works" and whatnot. That's especially true for shop systems which contain private data of customers but it's also important for any page that could be misused to send spam, distribute malware and whatnot.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pirocks 6y ago
  I was came across a stackoverflow question where someone was confused as to why their production database was being wrecked repeatedly. The answer was that they had rampant sql injection vulnerabilities in their code. The original poster refused to take down their site or notify users of a breach.
waihtis 6y ago
I hope this is satire.
- yitchelle 6y ago
  HN don't do humour, so no it's real.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    This is not true. I've seen satire posted here. I don't think this is satire, but I have seen it here.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      Previous commenter forgot to insert <sarcasm> tag.
Kaze404 6y ago
I don't understand why a person who couldn't bother to copy and paste their code would bother clicking this link and read 3 paragraphs of passive-aggressive text on why they're wrong. What problem does this solve that "please post your code" doesn't?
motohagiography 6y ago
For users, downvotes are low cost influence without participation or accountability, and for forum owners, it is a feature to reward the long tail of the least valuable users, who together make up a huge cohort, and it keeps that cohort engaged. Good of this site to be earnest, but I'd argue there is no meaningful "why," for downvotes, it's just a way to pander to the worst part of peoples nature.
CoolGuySteve 6y ago
I miss the slashdot Insightful/Informative/Funny/etc dropdown that was required to vote. It would add a lot of value to the downvote button and the "I disagree" option could silently not apply any modifier to prevent groupthink.
- pelliphant 6y ago
  While I mostly agree, there needs to be some function to filter out trolls and lies. But I do agree that simply disagreeing with someone shouldn't work the same way.
  - CoolGuySteve 6y ago
    Yes, the Slashdot options for downvotes are: Offtopic, Flamebait, Troll, Redundant If it were up to me, and aside from the neutral "I disagree", I'd add one for "Factually incorrect" because that's pretty much the only time I downvote on HN. I notice that often comment blocks will have a confidently incorrect technical post at the top of the discussion followed by a gish gallop of derailed technical debate.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Soylent added several extra levels. But they then added in more points per day. What ended up happening is the same that happened on slashdot. Everything is either +5 or -1 on a conversation that is only a few hours old. Early items dominate the conversation. Late ones get no interaction. Things that are like a 2-3 are bumped out to +5. Things that are 0-1 get knocked down to -1. Even then it depends on the group you get into the conversation and who posted earliest.
  - CoolGuySteve 6y ago
    My slashdot id is in the low 6 digits and everything you said was true 13 years ago. I suspect all online discussions are a Pareto distribution in terms of votes and visibility regardless of moderation tactics. I think the aggressive comment folding also aggravated the lack of interaction. There was no point in replying to a discussion more than 2 levels deep, nobody would see it.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
I downvoted because I disagree with your comment, but didn't have anything new to add. The other option would have been to add a comment that boils down to "nuhuh" which would be rude to everyone else reading. Now I just need a plugin to paste that for everytime I downvote.
- js8 6y ago
  I downvoted your comment to demonstrate that, in a hypothetical system with commented downvotes, if you add an unhelpful response with your downvote, that response itself can be downvoted as not contributing to the discussion.
ilaksh 6y ago
How about leaving a comment explaining why you downvoted?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
js8 6y ago
The question IMHO is, if people want to have a discussion, do downvotes without an explanation help to facilitate it? I don't think they do; there are many ways to disagree, while with agreement there is often little to add. Therefore, downvoting a comment should always require either upvote to a direct reply or another reply. Then this reply can also be judged for its value. I understand some people are tired of hearing the same old argument, or a wrong fact, and so they downvote without response. But consider that you're doing the moderation for others, not yourself. If you're tired of explaining the problem (even in the obvious cases, with one word), then perhaps do not get involved at all in negative moderation. Of course, the things that are obviously spam or offtopic should be deleted, not just downvoted, and that should be a different mechanism.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  The question IMHO is, if people want to have a discussion, do downvotes without an explanation help to facilitate it? I think they do, but I don't think it's an open and shut case. I see downvotes as dual-purpose. They are a behavioral nudge for the commenter, and they are a signal to everyone else that the comment does not contribute to healthy discussion. I'm fine if they fail to be the former in some cases. I've met a decent number of high functioning people in real life who are emotionally incapable of introspection and will go down the rabbit hole to defend something they've said/done that was clearly an asshole thing to say/do in the moment. Responding just gives them a target (you) for the inevitable defensive reaction. There are few people like that, but I've had enough interactions with the internet equivalent of this over my lifetime that I've long since given up on the idea that anybody who clearly comes across as an asshole on the internet will get reformed by a nicely worded "stop being mean". The other case where I might downvote and not respond is when it's a tired debate (usually political, often over diversity/equality related topics) and the comment is arguing with common talking points that use incorrect facts or is arguing with common bad faith talking points. I've been in too many of those over the years too. I'm not going to be the magical person who gets the other anonymous internet poster to recognize the error of their ways. Outside of those cases, I tend to respond after downvoting. Or just not downvote and respond anyway.
  - 6y ago
Traubenfuchs 6y ago
How about "I downvoted to increase the visibility of my answer relative to others to get more useless internet points."?
- panarky 6y ago
  It's not just the useless internet points, it's moving your point of view or points of view that you agree with higher on the page so it's seen by more people. Downvotes often have less to do with the quality of the content and more to do with gaming the page layout to get more impressions.
xwdv 6y ago
Downvotes are mostly weapons against people you don’t like. Believe it or not, I once had a very high karma here on HN. Over time it has dwindled and been withered away by downvotes. Nearly every post I make these days seems to get downvotes now, even for fairly innocuous posts. I don’t get it. I am almost certain that I have now been targeted by some downvotes cabal, and perhaps the same individuals continue to downvotes my posts and then dig into my post history to find even more posts to downvote. In my opinion, downvotes should not be anonymous. If someone disagrees with you then you should know their name. Instead, we have these forums where people hide like cowards while inflicting harm.
- Raphmedia 6y ago
  I looked through your comment history. You claim got me curious. Most of your downvoted comments (usually one liners) have comments under them (usually paragraphs) disagreeing with you and explaining why. Meanwhile, your downvoted comments that have no explanation added are simply out of place for the HN community. Swear words, short controversial statements, very political messages, etc. Do you truly believe this comment was downvoted because of a cabal and not because of its content?: "I’m tired of trashy Chinese tastes gaining so much influence in the world." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25527391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25527391
  - loceng 6y ago
    That type of commentary is definitely crude and distasteful, ignorant at least - however OP's points still stands. Downvotes are a weapon of oppression, not only to readers but it also allows others to easily dismiss something - to turn an impulse or urge into a simple downvote click for a hit of dopamine, so arguably it's suppressing and perhaps placating others who feel strong enough emotion where they feel the need to act - but instead of a qualitative response so we can see if their criticism is critical, they get to act with a click.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      Oppression is a bit strong word, I'd say downvotes promote groupthink. People with opposing worldviews simply stop commenting after receiving downvotes (and especially when banned from commenting for some time because of downvoting). Currently HN is very progressive, although there is a lot of people with conservative views, who simply don't comment. It could the the opposite: conservative majority with quiet progressives. It would be equally bad.
TameAntelope 6y ago
Submissions like these make me think that Slashdot's moderation was ahead of its time, even ahead of the current time.
abnry 6y ago
This reminds me of a reddit copypasta: --- I just downvoted your comment. FAQ What does this mean? The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Reddit account has decreased by one. Why did you do this? There are several reasons I may deem a comment to be unworthy of positive or neutral karma. These include, but are not limited to: Rudeness towards other Redditors, Spreading incorrect information, Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a /s. Am I banned from the Reddit? No - not yet. But you should refrain from making comments like this in the future. Otherwise I will be forced to issue an additional downvote, which may put your commenting and posting privileges in jeopardy. I don't believe my comment deserved a downvote. Can you un-downvote it? Sure, mistakes happen. But only in exceedingly rare circumstances will I undo a downvote. If you would like to issue an appeal, shoot me a private message explaining what I got wrong. I tend to respond to Reddit PMs within several minutes. Do note, however, that over 99.9% of downvote appeals are rejected, and yours is likely no exception. How can I prevent this from happening in the future? Accept the downvote and move on. But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated on Reddit.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: Reddit is privilege, not a right.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  > But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated downvoting has divulged into shaming. That's the real problem here. It trained millions of internet users to be hypersensitive to how others might react to their comment.
CivBase 6y ago
To me, an upvote just means "I think more people should see this" and a downvote just means "I think fewer people should see this". If I simply disagree with someone, I prefer to reply (or upvote someone else's reply) with an explanation of why I disagree. I try to only downvote posts with whom I disagree if I believe they are being mean. As for my own posts, I do get frustrated when I am downvoted but nobody replies with an explanation for why they downvoted me. I leave comments on sites like HN because I want to evolve my own thoughts on the subject and help others evolve theirs. So to me a downvoted post with no replies is a missed opportunity to evolve my thoughts and better understand those who disagree with me. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this site applies to HN comments.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  The person who downvoted has to look out for themselves though. They may earnestly want to explain their choice so you can engage with their counter-points, but other observers on HN are extremely discourteous. Signaling disagreement usually just causes a flood of tribalistic downvotes or upvotes for in-group voting, as well as people disingenuously using the flag option, and spamming rebuttals, especially disingenuous calls for data or evidence or “citation needed” requests that aren’t actually in the spirit on engagement, just serve to DDoS real disagreement out of the conversation. A silent downvote lets you avoid a lot of that, even if you respect the premise of the original post you downvoted.
  - gerikson 6y ago
    I've tried to be transparent on another site by explaining why I downvoted a comment, but the aggravation of being downvoted in retaliation, having to engage in back-and-forth with the commenter defending themselves, and being stalked and downvoted consistently afterwards made it frankly not worth it. This is a noble goal, and might work on StackOverflow, but I doubt it will get much traction.
- zigzaggy 6y ago
  I think more people should see this. I can't agree more with your comment about wishing people would reply with reasoning rather than simply downvoting. When I jump into a heated conversation or comment on an emotional topic, I am fully aware that I'm asking for downvotes without responses. But that has served as a negative reinforcement for making said comments, which leads to me engaging in those conversations much less often. My point is, I'm not sure this is a bug. I'm pretty sure its a feature.
rc-1140 6y ago
I think that the site is a nice idea in theory, but it's another technological solution for a social (interpersonal) problem, and I see two major aspects of it. 1. The people who would rely on this site should really consider upping their reading and social skills to determine if they should even consider expending the effort to respond in the first place. If it's deemed worth it to respond, get a feel for the language the question-asker is using to see if it's someone with vast dev experience but new to a certain system, someone with mid-level or just enough experience, etc., before one types out a response. This could be its own article, but this is a huge problem. 2. There are a lot of people who simply do not care that HackerNews/StackOverflow/etc. are communities and are just looking for answers to their questions. I've come to see that people can make all sorts of guides and resources like https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/ and community-specific resources like for IRCs, Discord channels, etc. but there are simply people who, while they aren't vindictive, don't give a shit about a given community's etiquette. The people who care enough will at least scan these guides and try their best. My biggest concern is that both of these aspects overlap and if this was actively used, there'd be situations where: - Experts/those knowledgeable in a certain domain but lacking in social acumen will lazily link these answers to people who are new but who have at least scanned community guides and have tried their best to create a post, leaving the new user feeling like they're simply being turned away - The same group noted above will perform the same deal with someone who doesn't care about the given community and just wants an answer, inciting this individual's vitriol and perpetuating the cycle of apathetic or "control freak" experts and outsider chumps expecting free work for no effort Solving the StackOverflow empty downvote problem is hard, but simply adding a hyperlink to someone else's pre-written words as a SO comment is not the right move.
bewuethr 6y ago
Discussed on meta.stackoverflow.com including an answer from then-employee Jon Ericson: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/355950 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/355950
compsciphd 6y ago
I don't understand why slashdot's old moderation and metamoderation tools aren't in more wide use. a downvote has to have a reason. votes are metamoderated to see if they are reasonable and if you are determined to not be reasonable, you lose moderating privileges.
at_a_remove 6y ago
Having been on a variety of forums for about three decades now, I think a lot about how this and other features can so heavily influence a site. Flat chronological versus threaded versus a "one-level nest" model. Upvoting, downvoting, flagging. Being able to directly reply to someone. Anonymous by default versus usernames versus sockpuppets versus anon-by-request-to-moderators versus "tripcodes" and so on. Does sorting exist, and if so, what is the default? And then the impact of upvotes and downvotes on that. Up/down versus favorites and bookmarks, favorites versus karma. Everything2 and the long-vanished "XP Pack Rape." The ease of account creation versus the ease of duplicate account creation. My suspicion is that, even more than moderators, nice FAQs, and such, these can influence the forum experience the most.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fartcannon 6y ago
Upvotes and downvotes are worthless. We need authorship identification analysis tools to visually identify shills, astroturfers, bot armies, people paid to promote things and the koolaid drinkers who back them up. For example, my posts would be marked as a F/OSS Zealot/Linux Fanboy. Or something like that. And further, if my account downvotes something about Apple, it should have less impact than if someone who is an Apple fanboy does it. Balance. Just an idea. ;)
wayneftw 6y ago
People downvote me all the time without saying why. I figure it's because they don't like what I'm saying but they simply cannot come up with a good rebuttal. So whenever that happens, I feel like I've won. Thanks for all the downvotes suckers!
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  That's actually a great way of thinking! I'll try to do that more often, thanks
godshatter 6y ago
On HN upvote counts on comments aren't shown in discussions but downvotes can lead to greyed out comments or dead comments. An upvote is communication to the person who posted the comment that it was positive in some way. For me, it usually stands in for "that's a good point", or "my thoughts exactly", or "this comment was unjustly downvoted". Downvotes, on the other hand, are a communication to everyone involved that that comment crossed a line in some kind of way. There's almost a social shaming that goes along with it. "Keep expressing that opinion and what you say will be increasingly harder for everyone else to see." I'm not a big fan of trying to suppress ideas. Much better to respond to them explaining why you disagree or, alternatively, to just ignore them and move on. I guess I don't feel it's up to me to work with others to make comments harder to read. People can make their own minds up without me having to tell them what they shouldn't agree with. That's why I only upvote and don't downvote.
medicineman 6y ago
Oh man, even more conflict free and passive aggressive as well! The NPC's should love this. Then someone can build a scraper, and bam, here is your social credit score!
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
I've frequently felt that HN could be (even) more engaging if we could see a 'controversy' score of some sort. Simply put, the % of upvotes vs. all votes for a comment. I feel this would be interesting because with the current approach, a comment can have +1 (yay!) upvotes, where in reality, 61 readers voted, 31 up, 30 down. Knowing that, I'd see the comment and discussion with more depth. Thoughts?
llimos 6y ago
As many others have said, I try to only downvote those not adding value to the discussion, or not following the guidelines. I have also (as I'm sure many people have) been the victim of downvotes simply from people disagreeing, which I think is not what downvotes are for. Which got me thinking. How about a system where we penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes? If a comment is genuinely not adding value, or against the guidelines, one imagines it would not garner many upvotes. So if a comment gets upvotes as well, this probably indicates that the downvotes are for simple disagreement, and those downvoting should lose karma. I'm not sure what the ratio should be, or how much the penalty should be. In my mind equal numbers of up and down indicates that the downvotes are misplaced. So perhaps something like if upvotes = downvotes/3, or maybe some hard limit like 4 upvotes would trigger downvote penalization. Perhaps this would make people think twice before downvoting for disagreement. As an aside, on StackOverflow downvoting costs you 1 point. I don't think that's a good system because sometimes a downvote is warranted, but something like the above seems more fair.
- notacoward 6y ago
  Counterpoint: comments that are counterfactual or fallacious deserve to be downvoted. "Not adding value to the discussion" is far too broad, since it includes many other things that can be extremely subjective, so I think it's not useful as a guideline. > penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes Seems like a version of automatic meta-moderation. I'm not strictly against the idea of modifying someone's "voting power" based on past voting behavior - frequent vs. infrequent, positive vs. negative, conformist (for lack of a better term) or contrary. However, such systems have to contend with the issue of reinforcing groupthink rather than actual quality, and the last thing HN needs is more groupthink. Also, any implementation is likely to involve the manipulation of values that aren't small integers, and apparently that's Too Hard.
floatingatoll 6y ago
Making use of this website at HN in comments would be a direct violation of the guidelines, as I read them anyways, since they specifically warn against discussing downvoting in this manner.
starkd 6y ago
With all due respect, it seems many are overthinking this. So concerned with winning the conversation that it becomes a contest. Perhaps this upvote/downvote feature is getting to be more of a distraction. Why not just enjoy being part of a conversation and listen. It doesn't have to be about promoting your agenda.
loceng 6y ago
I strongly dislike the downvote mechanism, it teaches laziness and limits/prevents learning. I'm copy/pasting a comment dang made not so long ago, followed by my reply: dang's comment: "Yes, I'm a moderator here. Sorry about all those scoldings and chidings. I know they're annoying, and if it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than to read [1]. But unfortunately the system can't regulate itself without feedback from some dedicated component—this is very clear. If we went by upvotes alone, the site would be dominated by indignation and sensationalism [2]. It's interesting to ask why. I thought about that for years and I think I found an answer. It's because although the community has many smart and well-intentioned people, each is giving only a fragment of their attention to HN (at least I hope they are). Some critical functions, like optimizing the site globally rather than just reacting to specific stories or comments, require someone whose job it is to give full attention to HN [3]. It's not that we're better—except in the sense that one gets better at anything with practice—it's that we play the role of looking out for the community as a whole. Actually the system has three components: community and moderators, but also software. That's interesting too, because it has always been a property of HN that the core moderators were also the programmers. We rely heavily on software to help manage the portions of the problem that can be handled that way, with the intention of freeing more of our attention for the optimization problem. It only works up to a point, but without it we'd be doomed. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:da... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dan... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209" My reply: 'Re: "... each is giving only a fragment of their attention to HN" Yet even based on this "you" think downvotes are a good idea to keep them, compounding the issue of partial attention with laziness by allowing a single click for a dopamine hit to satisfy someone's half-or-less attention interpretation of something - not required to spend the mental effort to actually qualitatively reply (that you/HN are seeming to strive for) where they'd be forced to pay more attention or their lack of attention will be exposed for fair ridicule via getting responded to; or the qualitative reply will help educate or cause the author being responded to hopefully learn something (that a downvote won't teach them) even if that is that they weren't clear enough with their writing and it's being misinterpreted. I'd implore you to do a multi-month to year trial of no downvotes on comments - I'm sure it'll piss off those who like to think they're right at half-or-less attention and regularly downvote click for that sweet sweet dopamine - and ironically those who normally downvote may actually comment their grievances/complain that there aren't downvotes. I'm not trying to pick a fight, though I'm really curious how you see these truths I explained above? Having downvotes seems to support a lower quality, less discussion, and less requirement for attention - which seems contrary to what you seem to be working towards?' Re: “If we went by upvotes alone, the site would be dominated by indignation and sensationalism [2].” dang offers no evidence of this, however I imagine anecdotally he sees how many upvotes/downvotes all comments receive. In reality what happens is those the upvoted comments at the top would already be at the top simply with the upvote mechanism - and the "lower quality" comments would move to the bottom anyway. If indignation truly is a problem - have that as a Flag option. If reviewing that is too much for the paid moderators, then find volunteers who will review and confirm - and then manually suppress anger, hate, and whatever else qualifies. Adding that Flag mechanism in to solve that problem would then undo the pitfalls of having downvotes. It’s odd too to me that dang/HN or anyone would allow a “mob” of people who you know will upvote angry commentary, meaning they’re reactive emotionally - getting a sweet hit of dopamine to reenforce the crowds anger - and then you’d also allow those same people the power on the other end of the spectrum, for them to unleash that reactiveness to downvote/suppress comments as well. No downvote option + have a “Flag for indignation” option to then require review by paid or volunteer mods would be a precision weapon compared to crowdsourcing this mob, expecting them to do a rational job of moderation duties. If it ends up being substantial more work that gets created then start asking for monthly contributions to pay to support for more moderators. Finally, is it really a good idea to allow people to get a reward for downvoting - just like giving the people who heavily upvote indignation a reward? Obviously it’s necessary to keep upvotes - I’ll hope that the precision moderation option I mention above will be implemented instead of downvotes.
FalconSensei 6y ago
For me downvoting should be for at least one: 1 - Not relevant to the discussion 2 - Rude/Offensive/Prejudice, etc Downvoting means the comment get less visibility. In real life conversations, when you don't agree, you don't turn down someone's voice so nobody can hear them. You either reply saying that you don't agree, or you get them out of the discussion if they are 1 or 2 above. If any opinion that is different than the prevailing opinion get downvoted - thus, less visible - people are not going to see the different angles of the discussion. Even if it's an opinion based on wrong assumptions/facts, other people might benefit from seeing the correction on the replies
alphachloride 6y ago
To quote some true words of wisdom > Ain't nobody got time for that No time for the poster to read through a page of text, or for the downvoter to find the most appropriate link describing their rationale. I think it is much better for the commenter to post in a reply why they downvoted. It shows they are willing to engage. To simply post a link may signal to the original poster that the downvoter couldn't be bothered, or that he just pushed a button and ran. Second, even for a broad class of entries downvoted for a similar reason, each one has some nuance which may get lost if all the poster has to go on is a preachy page.
soheil 6y ago
My first reaction was oh great a private comment reply so no one can see who wrote that comment and is only visible to the original poster. I think it’s an incredibly nuanced subject why people downvote. On sites like stack overflow or quora where there is more structure around answers and questions a cookie-cutter type response as to why somethings are downvoted may be a good approach but not on hacker news type sites. It would be a great idea to create a tool that allows others to leave a private reply anonymously so one can learn at least what others are thinking when they downvote even if one does not agree with the provided reply. The anonymous reply could be visible to everyone also as long as it remains anonymous I think is the key. In fact it could even improve the community if serial downvoters are required to leave replies instead of downvoting an unpopular comment to the abyss.
unabst 6y ago
Upvotes need no further abstraction for their purpose. Good can be good. But if we are to police and shame bad, justice deserves more nuance than this. Downvotes hinder the discussion experience, and it limits participants to those with agendas or characters who can withstand that experience. Downvotes help you avoid confrontation and discussion. You get to slap anyone on the wrist without them knowing it was you, or why. It's self-policing by censorship that directly counteracts free speech and free thinking. It's too convenient, too powerful, too disrespectful, too arbitrary, and too anonymous. Here comments literally fade out. You're voting to "cancel" a comment. Why respectfully reply when you run the risk of being downvoted yourself? Being wrong and downvoted is one thing, but what if you were not wrong? The votes are a measure of opinion and sentiment, not fact. And we can police comments, but we cannot police the downvotes. To then call this tally "karma" and equate this with your worth on a platform is a sure way to encourage thought alignment, not debate.
- unabst 6y ago
  Bottom-line, if anyone feels they've been unjustifiably downvoted, or even "sour" for being downvoted, the feature is being followed by a negative experience for the user. If there is nothing that can be done to improve the experience, then that is the price you pay for the positives that feature brings (in this case moderation), but if there is something that could be done, then you have no excuses not to do them, if you are to put the user experience first. What I would immediately do to improve the experience on HN: 1. As others have suggested, add a score for upvote/downvote total. So 50 upvotes and 51 downvotes = 101 points. Any points cancelled out could even be double Karma, or just the negative flipped to a positive. Engagement is worth valuing, and an upvote/downvote pair is healthy intellectual drama. 2. I would have a small list of keywords to select from displayed next to the comment title AFTER you click downvote. Downvoting should be a rare occasion (and I think it is), and adding one more step to add nuance to the downvote should be positive for the downvoter and the downvoted. So a comment after downvotes would look like: unabst 16 hours ago [–] troll 1 tone 2 incorrect 4 flagged dead This could be done for upvotes too, but maybe make the selection optional. I have a feeling on HN the shaming and bitterness of downvoting is not a bug but a feature. It's democratic, it's power to the user, it's fair, yada yada yada. Personally, at this point I am certain downvoting features lead to polarization, toxicity, bullying, group think, hesitation of substantive discourse, and a lot of negativity with the experience. And all the notable platforms with downvote features have suffered.

I Downvoted Because

118 points by vincent_s 6y ago

tchalla 6y ago

I have long been a proponent of using upvotes to increase the signal over downvotes to reduce the noise.

bak3y 6y ago
As long as upvotes can be manipulated (multiple accounts/bots) then having downvotes in places to reduce noise is necessary IMHO

warpech 6y ago

It has a passive-aggressive feel similar to LMGTFY. It would feel less like it, if there were some ready made text one-liners with a compassionate summary and a link to the longer version. Also, if you want to help - why would you downvote? Just help!

shawnz 6y ago
I think it ought to be the commenter's job to write the compassionate summary tailored to the situation.
- suprfsat 6y ago
  It ought to be the newbie's job to write what the problem is in complete sentences and not post screenshots of code, but we can't have everything.
  - jxf 6y ago
    Being new means you might not know you need to do that, though.
    - rc-1140 6y ago
      Complete sentences shouldn't be a foreign concept for people new to programming. I personally don't agree with the spirit of the parent comment, but I agree with the letter: it's ridiculous seeing half-formed sentences and screenshots with bumbling red-line diagrams made in the Windows Snipping Tool that somehow already have jpeg artifacts. ESL is a separate problem.
- detaro 6y ago
  Which removes the last shred of utility the linked site might have. (which is totally fine)
  - shawnz 6y ago
    Not necessarily, it could help to address common counterarguments
aloisdg 6y ago
I don't have the time for that and I don't want someone else to loose human time for this. Why would we if OP didn't?
pelliphant 6y ago
The reasons listed are grouped as "code review" or "stack overflow", places where I would usually want to help, and having a list of pre-written mistakes to copy-paste might be usefull. But the first half of the webpage only talk about communities in general, so I first assumed this was meant to be used on places like hackernews and reddit, places where downvotes most of the time mean: "you are an idiot/troll, I'm downvoting this to save other people from having to read this garbage." A situation where I really don't want to help the poster...

bovermyer 6y ago

I feel that both upvotes and downvotes have a negative effect on conversation, but having seen way too many "me too" and "+1" replies to things on other platforms, I can't really think of a good replacement.

kuroguro 6y ago
I feel like github's emotes (thumbs up etc) are good enough if you don't want a full blown upvote/downvote system.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  There's also the SoylentNews approach, based on the Slashdot approach. Positive scores are capped at +5, negative scores are capped at -1 (iirc), a reason must always be selected for a positive vote (e.g. Insightful) or a negative vote (e.g. Flamebait), and you also have the option of neutral votes (+0 Agree and -0 Disagree).
- jonfw 6y ago
  I like these on slack as well, and it's particularly nice that they're almost always positive or celebratory
martin_a 6y ago
Clear rules and an active moderation can help solve this. If posters of "me too"-answers will receive negative feedback for those kind of posts, they will probably stop. Maybe an idea for YouGotBlockedBecau.se/me-too ;-)
falcolas 6y ago
Perhaps a like/dislike button pair that just adds a single EM height bar in the thread with your username and a + or -, without moving comments around otherwise. It could be collapsable, with a "overview" of likes/dislikes.
zug_zug 6y ago
Really? This is inconceivable to me. I think they are essential for sorting good comments from bad. Here's an experiment -- Try reading your next HN thread from bottom (most downvoted) to top, and see if it's an equal experience. I find that any service that doesn't do vote-ranking (e.g. newspaper forums) usually turns atrocious almost immediately.

bochoh 6y ago

I like the system here where you cannot downvote until a certain aging process has occurred. Granted I’m not there yet, but not being able to downvote doesn’t impede the value I find on HN.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
500 karma is the threshold.
- Ajedi32 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, is all this stuff documented anywhere? I've been on HN for years now and I had no idea what that threshold was set at. Heck, I'm not even sure I fully understand how basic features like flagging work.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
Ajedi32 6y ago
HN has a lot of similar design choices in that respect that I've grown to like over time. For example: 1. You can't downvote direct replies to your own comments 2. You can't see comment scores other than your own 3. Heavily down voted comments aren't hidden, just greyed out 4. New comments are initially sorted near the top of the thread, so they aren't immediately buried and have a chance to get voted on 5. Comments on older threads can't be downvoted
- SilasX 6y ago
  >You can't see comment scores other than your own I wish you could also see the scores of direct replies to your comments, so you know if the replies are popular and merit being addressed. As it stands now, if you see 2+ replies, and they aren't greyed out or responded to, you have no idea if they're heavily upvoted, or just got ignored.

pdevr 6y ago

I just thought of this. I made a comment about a certain technology being double-edged and saw a couple of down votes. I really would have loved to know what caused the ire and have a polite discussion with the person. Suggestion: Technical forums have more than code being discussed. You may want to add categories or groups. Idea/HN feature wishlist: When you downvote a comment, you can add a reason right there. When you hover on any comment which was downvoted, you can see the reasons why it was downvoted.

jawns 6y ago
Your proposal sounds similar to the flagging mechanism on many online forums, where the person who flags the comment is asked to specify a reason so it can be triaged by a moderator. In the case of downvoting, it doesn't rise to the level of needing to be triaged by a mod, but I suppose you could argue that by giving the commenter a signal about why you downvoted, you're allowing them to self-triage (e.g. update the post to address the issue, or at least try to do better next time). Being able to choose from a short list of predefined downvote reasons -- even if it were between "This breaks forum rules" versus "I simply disagree" -- would be useful.
- pdevr 6y ago
  So the comment stating the reason for downvoting is meant for the person whose post was downvoted, even though everyone can see it. Yes, as you said, I guess it will be a type of opportunity to self-triage - in a public way. It will also (hopefully) make the person who downvotes pause and think about the reason for downvoting. Edit: typo/words
inglor_cz 6y ago
This would be a great feature, it would definitely help users grow and become more self-aware. I would welcome it.

Communitivity 6y ago

I think this is a great idea. I can think of four possible improvements: 1) Require a selection of one of the reasons when a downvote occurs (require HN cooperation & implementation) 2) Add a similar capability for upvoting reasons 3) Require a selection of one of the reasons when an upvote occurs 4) Add a 'save this' feature to HN, so an upvote is not used as a bookmark to quickly search HN posts you wanted to find again.

samizdis 6y ago
I use the "favorite" feature to save/bookmark HN posts.
- jjice 6y ago
  I'd love a "favorite" or "save" for comments too.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    It exists, you just have to be looking at the comment exclusively. Click on the timestamp next to the poster's name, and the 'favorite' button will be on the page.
  - samizdis 6y ago
    You can already "favorite" comments. Click on the "n minutes ago" link next to the commenter's name and you get the option. To view favorited submissions/comments, click your user name to go to your profile info. The links to favorited submissions and comments are there.
    - Communitivity 6y ago
      Thank you to the folks who told me about favorite option. I would say then that my request would be that favorite is a link with the main set up links under the post entry on the main page, rather than just on the page for that post.

anonunivgrad 6y ago

The only substitute for a mob-mentality-enforcing downvote system is human moderation by heroes who can withstand such pressure and biases.

dmitshur 6y ago

My current strategy is to never downvote (not counting the rare accidental misclicks that I don’t know about). Instead, I try to upvote other things that deserve to stand out. Leaving something at 0 upvotes is still a signal, although it’s less distinguishable from “no one saw this”. This approach makes the decision of voting binary (to upvote or not) rather than one with 3 choices, which reduces mental overhead. It also allows me to focus on positivity and finding comments that provide value, and pay less attention to ones that don’t. In the end, I think there can be value in downvoting, but I personally just don’t feel that the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.

undecisive 6y ago
I mostly feel the same, but I think there are differences in context - for example: - HN: Some really repugnant attitudes from time to time need to be downvoted. For example, personal attacks and things that would have been moderated out of existence on other platforms. - Stack Overflow et al: Answers that are objectively and dangerously wrong. And I don't mean answers that just misread the question - those actually might be useful for someone else who stumbled on the page looking for exactly that thing. I mean answers that are dangerous, vulnerable, misleading, or represent an extreme viewpoint as fact ("buhh object orientation is dangerous, you must write C++ using functional paradigms, it's the only way to make good programs") I worry that if stuff like this doesn't get downvoted by some, these things will be considered valid - or even acceptable - by others.
- js8 6y ago
  "Answers that are objectively and dangerously wrong." I don't think anybody reading an Internet discussion has so little time not to add to the downvote: "This part of your comment is horribly wrong, I warn others against doing it." Actually, I think I would be more convinced to be careful with that sentence than just seeing bunch of downvotes.
  - undecisive 6y ago
    Absolutely. Usually there's no problem in doing both (hence, I guess, the OP) But commenting without downvoting skews the ordering algorithms, and of course if someone else has already made a similar enough comment that you wouldn't be adding materially to the conversation, adding a similar comment just makes the post look busy an therefore, potentially, interesting.

arbitrage 6y ago

You could just communicate with words, like an adult though?

classified 6y ago
The grey text color of your comment seems to suggest that there is at least one HN member with at least 500 karma (hence the ability to downvote) who finds the mere mention of such an outrageous imposition to be worth a downvote. How dare you insinuate we could act like grown-ups?
- FalconSensei 6y ago
  The greyed out text color of your comment proves you are right!

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Good lord. You know, a lot of downvotes are rooted in "You and I come from vastly different backgrounds and will probably never see eye to eye" and it's a giant, giant, humongous, painful can of worms to dig around in that. A downvote (or ten) is the least painful way to let very different people "say" things like "Wow. I think you are stupid because I'm a racist/misogynist/classist asshole and the way you said it tells me you are the wrong color/a woman/poor." or "I'm from a different country or culture or religion and, good, god, there is so much baked in implicit assumptions that it would take weeks, months or years to sort out why we don't agree." I mean, if you participate regularly and remain civil, some of that may get sorted over time. But it's not going to get sorted today because you submitted the downvote equivalent of a "bug report." Downvotes are annoying. And they are often kind of like that saying about democracy: "the worst thing ever....except for all the other options." (Edit: I wish there were a word that meant simultaneously misogynist and/or misandrist. I don't mean to suggest it's just "men hating on women." (if only because plenty of women hate on other women) I just have been up all night and I'm failing to find the elegant way to say that in a more gender neutral or even-handed way. Sorry 'bout that.)

lrossi 6y ago
> I wish there were a word that meant simultaneously misogynist and/or misandrist You mean “sexist”?
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Misanthrope is sometimes the correct word for what I'm talking about. But have an upvote.
- effable 6y ago
  I don't want to be nitpicky but I am sorry I have to be: Is that feeling not better expressed by "misanthrope"?
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Misanthropy is more generalized. And even a misanthrope will engage with people of the opposite sex in lively (though, IME, very depressing) debates, and even be respectful within that context. Many misanthropes I've known will even respect people who are well-educated or otherwise "successful" (by some measure). Most sexists won't. Similar to racists.

csours 6y ago

I like the idea, but the title feels aggressive. I'm no psychometrist, but when people feel like they are being attacked, they don't respond in a positive way. Downvotes may be feedback, but they don't feel like it.

martin_a 6y ago

This is probably the best: https://idownvotedbecau.se/noattempt/ https://idownvotedbecau.se/noattempt/ I'm barely active on StackOverflow anymore, because posters show less and less effort. I'm somewhat of a senior WordPress developer and eager to help, but the sheer amount of absolute basic stuff, without any effort made by the poster, just kills it for me. And it's not even the "can you recommend a plugin"-questions, but those which show that somebody has been given a task (or took it by themselves) without knowing anything at all. It's like getting into a car and then asking what that round thing right in front of you is for. I just downvote and flag those questions. I think nobody should answer those questions at all and we have to discourage behaviour where people, without any knowlede and effort, try to collect breadcrumbs to (somehow) reach a goal without even trying to understand the bigger picture. edit: Why the bigger picture is important? Because we are talking about systems that are, in most cases, facing the internet. And the internet is a hostile place where attacks against your systems are starting right after setting them up. It's ultimately important to know what you are doing and what the consequences are (or could be) when you start tinkering with theme files, "how WooCommerce works" and whatnot. That's especially true for shop systems which contain private data of customers but it's also important for any page that could be misused to send spam, distribute malware and whatnot.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pirocks 6y ago
I was came across a stackoverflow question where someone was confused as to why their production database was being wrecked repeatedly. The answer was that they had rampant sql injection vulnerabilities in their code. The original poster refused to take down their site or notify users of a breach.

waihtis 6y ago

I hope this is satire.

yitchelle 6y ago
HN don't do humour, so no it's real.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  This is not true. I've seen satire posted here. I don't think this is satire, but I have seen it here.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    Previous commenter forgot to insert <sarcasm> tag.

Kaze404 6y ago

I don't understand why a person who couldn't bother to copy and paste their code would bother clicking this link and read 3 paragraphs of passive-aggressive text on why they're wrong. What problem does this solve that "please post your code" doesn't?

motohagiography 6y ago

For users, downvotes are low cost influence without participation or accountability, and for forum owners, it is a feature to reward the long tail of the least valuable users, who together make up a huge cohort, and it keeps that cohort engaged. Good of this site to be earnest, but I'd argue there is no meaningful "why," for downvotes, it's just a way to pander to the worst part of peoples nature.

CoolGuySteve 6y ago

I miss the slashdot Insightful/Informative/Funny/etc dropdown that was required to vote. It would add a lot of value to the downvote button and the "I disagree" option could silently not apply any modifier to prevent groupthink.

pelliphant 6y ago
While I mostly agree, there needs to be some function to filter out trolls and lies. But I do agree that simply disagreeing with someone shouldn't work the same way.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  Yes, the Slashdot options for downvotes are: Offtopic, Flamebait, Troll, Redundant If it were up to me, and aside from the neutral "I disagree", I'd add one for "Factually incorrect" because that's pretty much the only time I downvote on HN. I notice that often comment blocks will have a confidently incorrect technical post at the top of the discussion followed by a gish gallop of derailed technical debate.
sumtechguy 6y ago
Soylent added several extra levels. But they then added in more points per day. What ended up happening is the same that happened on slashdot. Everything is either +5 or -1 on a conversation that is only a few hours old. Early items dominate the conversation. Late ones get no interaction. Things that are like a 2-3 are bumped out to +5. Things that are 0-1 get knocked down to -1. Even then it depends on the group you get into the conversation and who posted earliest.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  My slashdot id is in the low 6 digits and everything you said was true 13 years ago. I suspect all online discussions are a Pareto distribution in terms of votes and visibility regardless of moderation tactics. I think the aggressive comment folding also aggravated the lack of interaction. There was no point in replying to a discussion more than 2 levels deep, nobody would see it.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

I downvoted because I disagree with your comment, but didn't have anything new to add. The other option would have been to add a comment that boils down to "nuhuh" which would be rude to everyone else reading. Now I just need a plugin to paste that for everytime I downvote.

js8 6y ago
I downvoted your comment to demonstrate that, in a hypothetical system with commented downvotes, if you add an unhelpful response with your downvote, that response itself can be downvoted as not contributing to the discussion.

ilaksh 6y ago

How about leaving a comment explaining why you downvoted?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

js8 6y ago

The question IMHO is, if people want to have a discussion, do downvotes without an explanation help to facilitate it? I don't think they do; there are many ways to disagree, while with agreement there is often little to add. Therefore, downvoting a comment should always require either upvote to a direct reply or another reply. Then this reply can also be judged for its value. I understand some people are tired of hearing the same old argument, or a wrong fact, and so they downvote without response. But consider that you're doing the moderation for others, not yourself. If you're tired of explaining the problem (even in the obvious cases, with one word), then perhaps do not get involved at all in negative moderation. Of course, the things that are obviously spam or offtopic should be deleted, not just downvoted, and that should be a different mechanism.

munchbunny 6y ago
The question IMHO is, if people want to have a discussion, do downvotes without an explanation help to facilitate it? I think they do, but I don't think it's an open and shut case. I see downvotes as dual-purpose. They are a behavioral nudge for the commenter, and they are a signal to everyone else that the comment does not contribute to healthy discussion. I'm fine if they fail to be the former in some cases. I've met a decent number of high functioning people in real life who are emotionally incapable of introspection and will go down the rabbit hole to defend something they've said/done that was clearly an asshole thing to say/do in the moment. Responding just gives them a target (you) for the inevitable defensive reaction. There are few people like that, but I've had enough interactions with the internet equivalent of this over my lifetime that I've long since given up on the idea that anybody who clearly comes across as an asshole on the internet will get reformed by a nicely worded "stop being mean". The other case where I might downvote and not respond is when it's a tired debate (usually political, often over diversity/equality related topics) and the comment is arguing with common talking points that use incorrect facts or is arguing with common bad faith talking points. I've been in too many of those over the years too. I'm not going to be the magical person who gets the other anonymous internet poster to recognize the error of their ways. Outside of those cases, I tend to respond after downvoting. Or just not downvote and respond anyway.
- 6y ago

Traubenfuchs 6y ago

How about "I downvoted to increase the visibility of my answer relative to others to get more useless internet points."?

panarky 6y ago
It's not just the useless internet points, it's moving your point of view or points of view that you agree with higher on the page so it's seen by more people. Downvotes often have less to do with the quality of the content and more to do with gaming the page layout to get more impressions.

xwdv 6y ago

Downvotes are mostly weapons against people you don’t like. Believe it or not, I once had a very high karma here on HN. Over time it has dwindled and been withered away by downvotes. Nearly every post I make these days seems to get downvotes now, even for fairly innocuous posts. I don’t get it. I am almost certain that I have now been targeted by some downvotes cabal, and perhaps the same individuals continue to downvotes my posts and then dig into my post history to find even more posts to downvote. In my opinion, downvotes should not be anonymous. If someone disagrees with you then you should know their name. Instead, we have these forums where people hide like cowards while inflicting harm.

Raphmedia 6y ago
I looked through your comment history. You claim got me curious. Most of your downvoted comments (usually one liners) have comments under them (usually paragraphs) disagreeing with you and explaining why. Meanwhile, your downvoted comments that have no explanation added are simply out of place for the HN community. Swear words, short controversial statements, very political messages, etc. Do you truly believe this comment was downvoted because of a cabal and not because of its content?: "I’m tired of trashy Chinese tastes gaining so much influence in the world." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25527391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25527391
- loceng 6y ago
  That type of commentary is definitely crude and distasteful, ignorant at least - however OP's points still stands. Downvotes are a weapon of oppression, not only to readers but it also allows others to easily dismiss something - to turn an impulse or urge into a simple downvote click for a hit of dopamine, so arguably it's suppressing and perhaps placating others who feel strong enough emotion where they feel the need to act - but instead of a qualitative response so we can see if their criticism is critical, they get to act with a click.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    Oppression is a bit strong word, I'd say downvotes promote groupthink. People with opposing worldviews simply stop commenting after receiving downvotes (and especially when banned from commenting for some time because of downvoting). Currently HN is very progressive, although there is a lot of people with conservative views, who simply don't comment. It could the the opposite: conservative majority with quiet progressives. It would be equally bad.

TameAntelope 6y ago

Submissions like these make me think that Slashdot's moderation was ahead of its time, even ahead of the current time.

abnry 6y ago

This reminds me of a reddit copypasta: --- I just downvoted your comment. FAQ What does this mean? The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Reddit account has decreased by one. Why did you do this? There are several reasons I may deem a comment to be unworthy of positive or neutral karma. These include, but are not limited to: Rudeness towards other Redditors, Spreading incorrect information, Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a /s. Am I banned from the Reddit? No - not yet. But you should refrain from making comments like this in the future. Otherwise I will be forced to issue an additional downvote, which may put your commenting and posting privileges in jeopardy. I don't believe my comment deserved a downvote. Can you un-downvote it? Sure, mistakes happen. But only in exceedingly rare circumstances will I undo a downvote. If you would like to issue an appeal, shoot me a private message explaining what I got wrong. I tend to respond to Reddit PMs within several minutes. Do note, however, that over 99.9% of downvote appeals are rejected, and yours is likely no exception. How can I prevent this from happening in the future? Accept the downvote and move on. But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated on Reddit.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: Reddit is privilege, not a right.

devmunchies 6y ago
> But learn from this mistake: your behavior will not be tolerated downvoting has divulged into shaming. That's the real problem here. It trained millions of internet users to be hypersensitive to how others might react to their comment.

CivBase 6y ago

To me, an upvote just means "I think more people should see this" and a downvote just means "I think fewer people should see this". If I simply disagree with someone, I prefer to reply (or upvote someone else's reply) with an explanation of why I disagree. I try to only downvote posts with whom I disagree if I believe they are being mean. As for my own posts, I do get frustrated when I am downvoted but nobody replies with an explanation for why they downvoted me. I leave comments on sites like HN because I want to evolve my own thoughts on the subject and help others evolve theirs. So to me a downvoted post with no replies is a missed opportunity to evolve my thoughts and better understand those who disagree with me. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this site applies to HN comments.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
The person who downvoted has to look out for themselves though. They may earnestly want to explain their choice so you can engage with their counter-points, but other observers on HN are extremely discourteous. Signaling disagreement usually just causes a flood of tribalistic downvotes or upvotes for in-group voting, as well as people disingenuously using the flag option, and spamming rebuttals, especially disingenuous calls for data or evidence or “citation needed” requests that aren’t actually in the spirit on engagement, just serve to DDoS real disagreement out of the conversation. A silent downvote lets you avoid a lot of that, even if you respect the premise of the original post you downvoted.
- gerikson 6y ago
  I've tried to be transparent on another site by explaining why I downvoted a comment, but the aggravation of being downvoted in retaliation, having to engage in back-and-forth with the commenter defending themselves, and being stalked and downvoted consistently afterwards made it frankly not worth it. This is a noble goal, and might work on StackOverflow, but I doubt it will get much traction.
zigzaggy 6y ago
I think more people should see this. I can't agree more with your comment about wishing people would reply with reasoning rather than simply downvoting. When I jump into a heated conversation or comment on an emotional topic, I am fully aware that I'm asking for downvotes without responses. But that has served as a negative reinforcement for making said comments, which leads to me engaging in those conversations much less often. My point is, I'm not sure this is a bug. I'm pretty sure its a feature.

rc-1140 6y ago

I think that the site is a nice idea in theory, but it's another technological solution for a social (interpersonal) problem, and I see two major aspects of it. 1. The people who would rely on this site should really consider upping their reading and social skills to determine if they should even consider expending the effort to respond in the first place. If it's deemed worth it to respond, get a feel for the language the question-asker is using to see if it's someone with vast dev experience but new to a certain system, someone with mid-level or just enough experience, etc., before one types out a response. This could be its own article, but this is a huge problem. 2. There are a lot of people who simply do not care that HackerNews/StackOverflow/etc. are communities and are just looking for answers to their questions. I've come to see that people can make all sorts of guides and resources like https://xyproblem.info/ https://xyproblem.info/ and community-specific resources like for IRCs, Discord channels, etc. but there are simply people who, while they aren't vindictive, don't give a shit about a given community's etiquette. The people who care enough will at least scan these guides and try their best. My biggest concern is that both of these aspects overlap and if this was actively used, there'd be situations where: - Experts/those knowledgeable in a certain domain but lacking in social acumen will lazily link these answers to people who are new but who have at least scanned community guides and have tried their best to create a post, leaving the new user feeling like they're simply being turned away - The same group noted above will perform the same deal with someone who doesn't care about the given community and just wants an answer, inciting this individual's vitriol and perpetuating the cycle of apathetic or "control freak" experts and outsider chumps expecting free work for no effort Solving the StackOverflow empty downvote problem is hard, but simply adding a hyperlink to someone else's pre-written words as a SO comment is not the right move.

bewuethr 6y ago

Discussed on meta.stackoverflow.com including an answer from then-employee Jon Ericson: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/355950 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/355950

compsciphd 6y ago

I don't understand why slashdot's old moderation and metamoderation tools aren't in more wide use. a downvote has to have a reason. votes are metamoderated to see if they are reasonable and if you are determined to not be reasonable, you lose moderating privileges.

at_a_remove 6y ago

Having been on a variety of forums for about three decades now, I think a lot about how this and other features can so heavily influence a site. Flat chronological versus threaded versus a "one-level nest" model. Upvoting, downvoting, flagging. Being able to directly reply to someone. Anonymous by default versus usernames versus sockpuppets versus anon-by-request-to-moderators versus "tripcodes" and so on. Does sorting exist, and if so, what is the default? And then the impact of upvotes and downvotes on that. Up/down versus favorites and bookmarks, favorites versus karma. Everything2 and the long-vanished "XP Pack Rape." The ease of account creation versus the ease of duplicate account creation. My suspicion is that, even more than moderators, nice FAQs, and such, these can influence the forum experience the most.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fartcannon 6y ago

Upvotes and downvotes are worthless. We need authorship identification analysis tools to visually identify shills, astroturfers, bot armies, people paid to promote things and the koolaid drinkers who back them up. For example, my posts would be marked as a F/OSS Zealot/Linux Fanboy. Or something like that. And further, if my account downvotes something about Apple, it should have less impact than if someone who is an Apple fanboy does it. Balance. Just an idea. ;)

wayneftw 6y ago

People downvote me all the time without saying why. I figure it's because they don't like what I'm saying but they simply cannot come up with a good rebuttal. So whenever that happens, I feel like I've won. Thanks for all the downvotes suckers!

FalconSensei 6y ago
That's actually a great way of thinking! I'll try to do that more often, thanks

godshatter 6y ago

On HN upvote counts on comments aren't shown in discussions but downvotes can lead to greyed out comments or dead comments. An upvote is communication to the person who posted the comment that it was positive in some way. For me, it usually stands in for "that's a good point", or "my thoughts exactly", or "this comment was unjustly downvoted". Downvotes, on the other hand, are a communication to everyone involved that that comment crossed a line in some kind of way. There's almost a social shaming that goes along with it. "Keep expressing that opinion and what you say will be increasingly harder for everyone else to see." I'm not a big fan of trying to suppress ideas. Much better to respond to them explaining why you disagree or, alternatively, to just ignore them and move on. I guess I don't feel it's up to me to work with others to make comments harder to read. People can make their own minds up without me having to tell them what they shouldn't agree with. That's why I only upvote and don't downvote.

medicineman 6y ago

Oh man, even more conflict free and passive aggressive as well! The NPC's should love this. Then someone can build a scraper, and bam, here is your social credit score!

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

I've frequently felt that HN could be (even) more engaging if we could see a 'controversy' score of some sort. Simply put, the % of upvotes vs. all votes for a comment. I feel this would be interesting because with the current approach, a comment can have +1 (yay!) upvotes, where in reality, 61 readers voted, 31 up, 30 down. Knowing that, I'd see the comment and discussion with more depth. Thoughts?

llimos 6y ago

As many others have said, I try to only downvote those not adding value to the discussion, or not following the guidelines. I have also (as I'm sure many people have) been the victim of downvotes simply from people disagreeing, which I think is not what downvotes are for. Which got me thinking. How about a system where we penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes? If a comment is genuinely not adding value, or against the guidelines, one imagines it would not garner many upvotes. So if a comment gets upvotes as well, this probably indicates that the downvotes are for simple disagreement, and those downvoting should lose karma. I'm not sure what the ratio should be, or how much the penalty should be. In my mind equal numbers of up and down indicates that the downvotes are misplaced. So perhaps something like if upvotes = downvotes/3, or maybe some hard limit like 4 upvotes would trigger downvote penalization. Perhaps this would make people think twice before downvoting for disagreement. As an aside, on StackOverflow downvoting costs you 1 point. I don't think that's a good system because sometimes a downvote is warranted, but something like the above seems more fair.

notacoward 6y ago
Counterpoint: comments that are counterfactual or fallacious deserve to be downvoted. "Not adding value to the discussion" is far too broad, since it includes many other things that can be extremely subjective, so I think it's not useful as a guideline. > penalize downvotes that are on comments which also have several upvotes Seems like a version of automatic meta-moderation. I'm not strictly against the idea of modifying someone's "voting power" based on past voting behavior - frequent vs. infrequent, positive vs. negative, conformist (for lack of a better term) or contrary. However, such systems have to contend with the issue of reinforcing groupthink rather than actual quality, and the last thing HN needs is more groupthink. Also, any implementation is likely to involve the manipulation of values that aren't small integers, and apparently that's Too Hard.

floatingatoll 6y ago

Making use of this website at HN in comments would be a direct violation of the guidelines, as I read them anyways, since they specifically warn against discussing downvoting in this manner.

starkd 6y ago

With all due respect, it seems many are overthinking this. So concerned with winning the conversation that it becomes a contest. Perhaps this upvote/downvote feature is getting to be more of a distraction. Why not just enjoy being part of a conversation and listen. It doesn't have to be about promoting your agenda.

loceng 6y ago

I strongly dislike the downvote mechanism, it teaches laziness and limits/prevents learning. I'm copy/pasting a comment dang made not so long ago, followed by my reply: dang's comment: "Yes, I'm a moderator here. Sorry about all those scoldings and chidings. I know they're annoying, and if it helps at all, they're even more tedious to write than to read [1]. But unfortunately the system can't regulate itself without feedback from some dedicated component—this is very clear. If we went by upvotes alone, the site would be dominated by indignation and sensationalism [2]. It's interesting to ask why. I thought about that for years and I think I found an answer. It's because although the community has many smart and well-intentioned people, each is giving only a fragment of their attention to HN (at least I hope they are). Some critical functions, like optimizing the site globally rather than just reacting to specific stories or comments, require someone whose job it is to give full attention to HN [3]. It's not that we're better—except in the sense that one gets better at anything with practice—it's that we play the role of looking out for the community as a whole. Actually the system has three components: community and moderators, but also software. That's interesting too, because it has always been a property of HN that the core moderators were also the programmers. We rely heavily on software to help manage the portions of the problem that can be handled that way, with the intention of freeing more of our attention for the optimization problem. It only works up to a point, but without it we'd be doomed. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=tedious%20write%20read%20by:da... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dan... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209" My reply: 'Re: "... each is giving only a fragment of their attention to HN" Yet even based on this "you" think downvotes are a good idea to keep them, compounding the issue of partial attention with laziness by allowing a single click for a dopamine hit to satisfy someone's half-or-less attention interpretation of something - not required to spend the mental effort to actually qualitatively reply (that you/HN are seeming to strive for) where they'd be forced to pay more attention or their lack of attention will be exposed for fair ridicule via getting responded to; or the qualitative reply will help educate or cause the author being responded to hopefully learn something (that a downvote won't teach them) even if that is that they weren't clear enough with their writing and it's being misinterpreted. I'd implore you to do a multi-month to year trial of no downvotes on comments - I'm sure it'll piss off those who like to think they're right at half-or-less attention and regularly downvote click for that sweet sweet dopamine - and ironically those who normally downvote may actually comment their grievances/complain that there aren't downvotes. I'm not trying to pick a fight, though I'm really curious how you see these truths I explained above? Having downvotes seems to support a lower quality, less discussion, and less requirement for attention - which seems contrary to what you seem to be working towards?' Re: “If we went by upvotes alone, the site would be dominated by indignation and sensationalism [2].” dang offers no evidence of this, however I imagine anecdotally he sees how many upvotes/downvotes all comments receive. In reality what happens is those the upvoted comments at the top would already be at the top simply with the upvote mechanism - and the "lower quality" comments would move to the bottom anyway. If indignation truly is a problem - have that as a Flag option. If reviewing that is too much for the paid moderators, then find volunteers who will review and confirm - and then manually suppress anger, hate, and whatever else qualifies. Adding that Flag mechanism in to solve that problem would then undo the pitfalls of having downvotes. It’s odd too to me that dang/HN or anyone would allow a “mob” of people who you know will upvote angry commentary, meaning they’re reactive emotionally - getting a sweet hit of dopamine to reenforce the crowds anger - and then you’d also allow those same people the power on the other end of the spectrum, for them to unleash that reactiveness to downvote/suppress comments as well. No downvote option + have a “Flag for indignation” option to then require review by paid or volunteer mods would be a precision weapon compared to crowdsourcing this mob, expecting them to do a rational job of moderation duties. If it ends up being substantial more work that gets created then start asking for monthly contributions to pay to support for more moderators. Finally, is it really a good idea to allow people to get a reward for downvoting - just like giving the people who heavily upvote indignation a reward? Obviously it’s necessary to keep upvotes - I’ll hope that the precision moderation option I mention above will be implemented instead of downvotes.

FalconSensei 6y ago

For me downvoting should be for at least one: 1 - Not relevant to the discussion 2 - Rude/Offensive/Prejudice, etc Downvoting means the comment get less visibility. In real life conversations, when you don't agree, you don't turn down someone's voice so nobody can hear them. You either reply saying that you don't agree, or you get them out of the discussion if they are 1 or 2 above. If any opinion that is different than the prevailing opinion get downvoted - thus, less visible - people are not going to see the different angles of the discussion. Even if it's an opinion based on wrong assumptions/facts, other people might benefit from seeing the correction on the replies

alphachloride 6y ago

To quote some true words of wisdom > Ain't nobody got time for that No time for the poster to read through a page of text, or for the downvoter to find the most appropriate link describing their rationale. I think it is much better for the commenter to post in a reply why they downvoted. It shows they are willing to engage. To simply post a link may signal to the original poster that the downvoter couldn't be bothered, or that he just pushed a button and ran. Second, even for a broad class of entries downvoted for a similar reason, each one has some nuance which may get lost if all the poster has to go on is a preachy page.

soheil 6y ago

My first reaction was oh great a private comment reply so no one can see who wrote that comment and is only visible to the original poster. I think it’s an incredibly nuanced subject why people downvote. On sites like stack overflow or quora where there is more structure around answers and questions a cookie-cutter type response as to why somethings are downvoted may be a good approach but not on hacker news type sites. It would be a great idea to create a tool that allows others to leave a private reply anonymously so one can learn at least what others are thinking when they downvote even if one does not agree with the provided reply. The anonymous reply could be visible to everyone also as long as it remains anonymous I think is the key. In fact it could even improve the community if serial downvoters are required to leave replies instead of downvoting an unpopular comment to the abyss.

unabst 6y ago

Upvotes need no further abstraction for their purpose. Good can be good. But if we are to police and shame bad, justice deserves more nuance than this. Downvotes hinder the discussion experience, and it limits participants to those with agendas or characters who can withstand that experience. Downvotes help you avoid confrontation and discussion. You get to slap anyone on the wrist without them knowing it was you, or why. It's self-policing by censorship that directly counteracts free speech and free thinking. It's too convenient, too powerful, too disrespectful, too arbitrary, and too anonymous. Here comments literally fade out. You're voting to "cancel" a comment. Why respectfully reply when you run the risk of being downvoted yourself? Being wrong and downvoted is one thing, but what if you were not wrong? The votes are a measure of opinion and sentiment, not fact. And we can police comments, but we cannot police the downvotes. To then call this tally "karma" and equate this with your worth on a platform is a sure way to encourage thought alignment, not debate.

unabst 6y ago
Bottom-line, if anyone feels they've been unjustifiably downvoted, or even "sour" for being downvoted, the feature is being followed by a negative experience for the user. If there is nothing that can be done to improve the experience, then that is the price you pay for the positives that feature brings (in this case moderation), but if there is something that could be done, then you have no excuses not to do them, if you are to put the user experience first. What I would immediately do to improve the experience on HN: 1. As others have suggested, add a score for upvote/downvote total. So 50 upvotes and 51 downvotes = 101 points. Any points cancelled out could even be double Karma, or just the negative flipped to a positive. Engagement is worth valuing, and an upvote/downvote pair is healthy intellectual drama. 2. I would have a small list of keywords to select from displayed next to the comment title AFTER you click downvote. Downvoting should be a rare occasion (and I think it is), and adding one more step to add nuance to the downvote should be positive for the downvoter and the downvoted. So a comment after downvotes would look like: unabst 16 hours ago [–] troll 1 tone 2 incorrect 4 flagged dead This could be done for upvotes too, but maybe make the selection optional. I have a feeling on HN the shaming and bitterness of downvoting is not a bug but a feature. It's democratic, it's power to the user, it's fair, yada yada yada. Personally, at this point I am certain downvoting features lead to polarization, toxicity, bullying, group think, hesitation of substantive discourse, and a lot of negativity with the experience. And all the notable platforms with downvote features have suffered.