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The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets it wrong (2009)

• motohagiography 6y ago
  > The advantage of this system is that nobody gets downvoted, but at a steep cost: we’ve lost half the potential information. A Mr. Claude Shannon would like a word. I joke, but when you have controls on voting rings and co-ordination, downvotes are necessarily noisier. An upvote is effectively neutral engagement with the content, where a downvote actively reduces engagement. From the perspective of wanting to mine the constructive engagement out of the collective minds of the audience, downvotes are about as meaningful and information dense as a fire alarm.
• ericmay 6y ago
  I really like downvoting where you lose one of your past upvotes in order to downvote. It's a nice little filter that people who care about how many upvotes they have won't use, and puts an end to some amount of frivolous downvoting. In a meta way, you kind of have to use a little bit of your own point capital to downvote something, so if you're highly upvoted by the community then calling BS on something is easier for you and the risk taking for doing so makes more sense, versus someone who just signed up. I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained?
  • s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I like the idea of only showing the number of up boats and when her user is negative, and possibly taking action at some point. And avoid users speaking to the audience opposed to directly addressing the parent comment Hacker news gates some functionality based on accumulated Votes, so maybe once you hit the necessary threshold it is hidden
  • kergonath 6y ago
    I am not sure adding a cost to downvotes would promote diversity so much. It is easy to game the system and post popular opinions to farm upvotes. If you do what you say, you give more power to the people already playing the reputation game. You also let garbage fester because nobody will use points to downvote a stupid, agressive one-liner. My experience is that: - voting on HN works well for its intended purpose, which is surfacing the interesting conversations - dead comments really deserve to die (I can’t remember a counter-example) - greyed out comments tend to be right but unpopular, or right but rude, or wrong, or just stupid. Of these, the problematic cases are “right but unpopular”, which is not that frequent. And when it happens that’s fine, they are still readable. > I also wonder, for a site like hacker news what's the point of even showing the user the # of upvotes they've obtained? I assume it promotes engaging in the comments. It’s true that popularity contests should not be encouraged too much, but at the same time I can see how having a number that can go down would make some people think twice before knee-jerk posting or casual trolling.
• btilly 6y ago
  The title should say that this was 2009. And I think that HN has held up pretty well over the years.
  • Hnrobert42 6y ago
    I noticed the pub date when the author says that maybe HN gets away without downvotes because HN is young, founded in 2007. I am glad the author turned out to be wrong.
• NobodyNada 6y ago
  (2009), by Jeff Atwood. I would have been very surprised to hear today's Stack Overflow staff talking about the value of downvoting. Atwood's experience with downvoting on Hacker News is definitely a bit dated as well: > (update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. It is buried in the faq) > (I apologize for my misunderstanding, but there’s no visible UI for downvoting, and I can’t recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in all the times I’ve visited Hacker News! Also, I put these comments in parens to make them extra-LISPy so Paul Graham would see my corrections.)
  • seba_dos1 6y ago
    > there’s no visible UI for downvoting For you. I see two arrows - one for upvoting and one for downvoting - next to every comment in this thread. [edit] Haha, somehow missed that this was a quote from the article, sorry :D
    • zests 6y ago
      Except this one :)
  • Macha 6y ago
    You might be surprised: https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve... There's been a couple of blog posts from the SE staff trying to move the needle on how close/downvote happy the community is.
    • NobodyNada 6y ago
      Sorry for the confusion, I was referencing how it would be unusual to hear SE staff today talking about why downvoting is an important quality-control feature and how it can be made more useful and more helpful for new users, rather than just condemning downvotes as hostile. In fact, the blog post you linked was at the forefront of my mind as an example of SE staff not "getting it." Stack Overflow's moderation system has not scaled very well; it's unhelpful for new users, and frustrating for power users and volunteer moderators. The company has largely refused to address these issues since about ~2015, when they promised a series of grandiose moderation overhauls and...never implemented any of it. Since then, their usual strategy for dealing with moderation failures is to throw the community under the bus. The article you linked caused a lot of drama within the community, because it accused volunteers of "judging users for not knowing things" for performing basic moderation tasks like marking questions as duplicates -- a feature that's supposed to help users by pointing them to an authoritative answer. The duplicate feature has a lot of warts; it does not adequately explain how users can nominate their question for reopening by clarifying why it's not a duplicate, and even if it was discoverable the reopen process is horribly broken anyway. But instead of addressing the obvious issues with the moderation system, they just wrote a blog post about how hostile their volunteers are. A longtime SE power user explained it better than I could: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777 > For years, you have been working on cleaning up an oil drip out of a beautiful lake with a spoon, but the small spoon you have is actually a fork. You've spent years asking for at least a spoon to work with, but have gotten nothing. For some reason, though, you keep at it with the fork, for different reasons - some are the people next to you also working with forks, some are the occasional diamond that you can clean and set and make nice - all for free and out of your own time. > Then, one day [...] the lake starts shouting at you about how the fork you're using is being unfair to the oil - that you're being too unwelcoming to the oil and not treating it properly, completely ignoring the fact that you've been using a fork and have been asking for better tools for years. The lake slaps you anyway. In fairness: within the last year or two they finally seem to have hired some staff members who finally get it and are taking steps towards actually fixing the site's moderation problems. However, I haven't been on the site for a while and so I couldn't tell you whether they are actually having a meaningful impact or just making more empty promises.
• minikites 6y ago
  >It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. The success of "broken windows" policing is not supported by much evidence, so the rest of article based on this concept is suspect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#Criticis...
  • vxNsr 6y ago
    Most of the criticism appears to come from misguided CRT roots. Thus the criticism itself is suspect.
  • ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    I have no opinion on New York and its implementation of the theory but I think it's indeed very clear that the theory applies to community management. I manage an instant messaging community of about 10000 stem professionals and you can see negative community feedback loops develop or die down in real time depending on how you act on them. It's evident new members take in the vibe when they arrive and act to reinforce good or bad trends. If you let people make crass jokes, soon they're posting rude comments then insulting each others. If you let people post memes about technical topics, soon it's random tiktok videos, then it's porn. If you let a regular member go off on a newbie who asks a bad question, the next thing you know people are bullying newcomers left and right. All I wanted was to build a nice virtual gathering spot and meet cool people but now I have to play fascist because the feedback effect is so strong.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• nix0n 6y ago
  Stack Overflow is certainly one to talk about this. Last time I tried (a few years ago), voting in either direction required a minimum number of points there also. These days, I accept the votes on S.O. for what they are, and hit the "End" key to read the least-upvoted answer first.
• happytoexplain 6y ago
  >I can’t recall ever seeing a single negative voted comment in all the times I’ve visited Hacker News That's interesting. I wonder how that could be the case.
  • Macha 6y ago
    While the treshold for downvoting has increased since 2009, the threshold hasn't increased to the same level that the number of active users (and therefore votes) have, so I would guess proportionally way more of the community has access to downvotes today than in 2009. Also, I think in those days you did see vote numbers, but you didn't see the big obvious greying out of downvoted comments that exists today.
• ameister14 6y ago
  I think one obvious problem with downvoting where downvotes automatically hide content is that it creates echo chambers. The downvote button is definitely a 'disagree' button here and I think it's not really conducive to great discussions. Then again, this isn't really a forum - it's transitory comments about the news of the day. Perhaps the argument is that there shouldn't be substantive discussion here in the first place. You're clearly meant to respond to the article more than the individual comment - the tree style commenting system and automatically hidden nature of comments down the chain both speak to that.
  • wincy 6y ago
    I’m not sure I agree. I tend to say things that are somewhat controversial on HN, and if I said them in San Francisco I’d be liable to be tarred and feathered, being a Libertarian from Kansas, but I try to be diplomatic and haven’t yet had a comment that’s gotten hidden. I think people are fairly charitable as long as you’re presenting a cogent argument. I always show dead comments and honestly, people aren’t missing out on much. To get your comment dead in my experience you have to either be extremely inflammatory or just spout absolute nonsense.
    • ameister14 6y ago
      I think HN does it better than reddit, where the comments are hidden quickly once negative, but I've seen a lot of comments edited based on downvotes as people wonder what, exactly, other users are disagreeing with. Doesn't exactly contribute other than to say 'your opinion is wrong.'
• elhudy 6y ago
  The glaring issue in this article (which I couldn't bring myself to finish) is that he equates downvoting to "evil or incorrect post(s)". Which would be true in an ideal world, but the reality becomes downvotes are equivalent to "I disagree with you". If plentiful downvoting is allowed, discourse becomes a popularity contest. Fortunately most of the experienced users here seem to understand this and reserve their downvotes for appropriate situations.
  • robbyking 6y ago
    I moderate a reddit community with ~200k subscribers, and I really wish I could disable downvoting. Automod takes care of most posts that violate our community rules, and I usually catch the ones that slip past within an hour or so. On the opposite end of the spectrum, quality posts are almost always downvoted immediately. (I assume it's by self-promoters hoping that it will cause their content to rise in the rankings.) Hiding posts scores has helped with bandwagoning, but I wish the two options were "upvote" and "report to mods."
    • FpUser 6y ago
      >"...upvote and report to mods." This to me seems like the best approach.
    • mjevans 6y ago
      Further: A) It would be nice if the mods had a way to flag the post to make it require additional work to see on most / default clients. B) If multiple mods sign off on a given post being a poor match for constructive discourse that is when most clients wouldn't even display the existence without a special viewing mode or preference. (This assumes an append / write-only forum.) C) For all USERS, it would be nice if a special type of reply allowed for a post to be a "contrasting viewpoint", which might get displayed at the same node-level as the post being replied to, as part of a package of tightly related views on a topic.
  • notafraudster 6y ago
    I tend to downvote at the nexus of stuff I disagree with + expressed in an unproductive, rude, spammy, abusive, or flip manner. It's certainly true that when a flippant post is something I agree with I'm more likely to elide on by it. I assume most people do the same thing.
• ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  Interesting, making downvotes costly seems like a good system. Though downvotes seem to work pretty well as-is for HN, I rarely see dead comments that were killed by downvotes rather than anti-spam features. If we take HN as reddit 2.0, what would be HN 2.0 I wonder? If I were the one to make it I'd create a system to promote the comments of people with professional expertise on the subject being discussed. HN has mostly solved the politeness and flamewar issues but IMO one its major flaws is that people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about.
  • germinalphrase 6y ago
    “one its major flaws is that people speak authoritatively about things they don't know about” See: any thread about aeronautics, education, or (historical) warfare.
    • ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
      ... and machine learning and medical research and ...
      • zentiggr 6y ago
        ... and ... and ... and ...
      • teach 6y ago
        I personally notice this most frequently on the topic of human nutrition. Most days I don't bother to read the comments on ANY nutrition article because they're too depressingly wrong.
  • threatofrain 6y ago
    I think if people want the next level of quality on technical discussion, there needs to be a gatekeeping mechanism which is concerned with technical competency. I would also expect such a place to have a magnitude or two fewer people.
• jerrac 6y ago
  I initially loved the idea of voting posts up and down. Thanks to seeing how it actually works on SO and here, well, I am not much of a fan anymore. At the very least, if I ever implemented it myself, I'd require that people explain why they are voting up, or voting down, before they could vote. And I'd not limit users from being able to vote until they magically get to the right amount of "karma". Without requiring an explanation, votes are more akin to boos and cheers than anything useful. Not a very good way to encourage a diverse culture.
  • Miraste 6y ago
    > Not a very good way to encourage a diverse culture I'd guess that's the point - giving power over visibility to users who've proved themselves in line with the forum zeitgeist helps maintain a site's culture as-is and prevent it "diversifying" into Smaller Facebook #50691.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Yeah, I really wish that HN required you to comment in order to downvote. Or even just required that a comment had replies before it could be downvoted; I don't care so much that every single person justifies their downvote as that the person getting downvoted gets an explanation.
    • whymauri 6y ago
      I like that a comment requires at least one comment before a downvote. Maybe not a comment for each downvote, since that might encourage dogpiling. Imagine a new user makes a social faux pas and suddenly receives ~4 relatively negative comments.
    • CSSer 6y ago
      I initially really liked this idea. I think the only problem is that it could lead to requiring more moderation. It's very hard to enforce quality. Right now I'm imagining a bandwagon chain of "You suck!" or other low quality comments just for the price of downvoting. I guess you could impose a minimum character requirement. At any rate, the idea of it being visible only to the user being downvoted is somewhat novel as well.
• dang 6y ago
  Getting it wrong for 12 years now: The Value of Downvoting, Or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25633668 - Jan 2021 (1 comment) 10 Years In, Was He Right? “Value of Downvoting; How HN Gets It Wrong” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409231 - June 2020 (1 comment) The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13325726 - Jan 2017 (12 comments) The Value of Downvoting or How Hacker News Gets It Wrong (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10875619 - Jan 2016 (36 comments) Reddit's Discussion about HN - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508801 - March 2009 (24 comments) The Value of Downvoting, or, How Hacker News Gets It Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=507948 - March 2009 (114 comments)
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • klyrs 6y ago
    The value of downvoting, or how Stackexchange gets it wrong about HN's voting system. It's hilarious that they start with some misconceptions about downvoting, notice that they're wrong, and forge boldly ahead without updating their understanding. If my hottest takes are any indication, the reputation floor -4 for a comment, not zero as they suggest. I haven't noticed a ceiling on upvotes. Upvotes help stories rise to the top, but conversation keeps them there. Why downvote a story that isn't interesting? Just don't comment and it will go away soon. Flagging is for problematic stories. What I love about HN is that, unlike Reddit and SE, is that discussion is the major feature. The moderation system is tailored around facilitating that. Contrast that to other sites, reputation is the game, and content revolves around the people playing that game. 12 years later, SE is still getting it wrong. Not just in their understanding of HN's downvotes, not just in their understanding of HN's purpose, but they're still a reputation game and the quality of the site suffers for it.
    • oceliker 6y ago
• batch12 6y ago
  I would like the ability to see my ratio of upvotes to downvotes. I think it would help show me if I was applying the same zeal to promote ideas as I use to demote them.
  • jessaustin 6y ago
    Is there a reason to think that equality is important here? Could it be that promotion zeal should be e.g. 62% of demotion zeal?
    • batch12 6y ago
      It would be interesting to know if I am quicker to reward a good idea vs punish a bad one. No target in mind.
• deeg 6y ago
  I assume that Jeff has changed his mind on this because Discourse does not have down-votes (with the caveat that Discourse has a different audience from HN). I wonder what made the difference?
  • uniqueid 6y ago
    He and Joel had this bullet-proof theory that, since quality answers are more valuable on SO than questions, the site should encourage users to criticize their peers. So what presumably happened is that he noticed that philosophy, sound as it may be on paper, created a miserable atmosphere.
• benlivengood 6y ago
  I've been through several forum deaths. The cause is usually large growth from people with very different mindsets that downvote for essentially political reasons instead of encouraging good discourse. This makes the best people leave in short order. In a sense there's no way to structure a forum to avoid this. Being outnumbered by people who don't value open communication is unpleasant with or without downvoting. Forums that are highly specific to a small audience can last a long time. Popularity is the death-knell.
  • joering2 6y ago
    Would actually like to see a list of largest karma-wise HN members who left. By leaving I would say over 180 days inactive. Dang can you post the result please: SELECT hn_name, hn_karma, hn_last_active FROM comments WHERE TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY, hn_last_active, NOW()) > 180 ORDER BY hn_karma DESC LIMIT 100
    • the_lonely_road 6y ago
      Be the change that you want to see in the universe. HN has a super easy to use API and I have downloaded the entire history of the site before for a past project. If you don't want to do the leg work yourself I am positive that the data set is out there for download somewhere if you google around.
      • minimaxir 6y ago
        Data analysis note: the public datasets only have submissions and comments, and just because a HN user has stopped submitting/commenting doesn't mean they quit HN. Lurking is fun.
        • DoreenMichele 6y ago
          Some people have simply changed their handle and that likely wouldn't be obvious from the public data set either. My old handle has 25k. It has been inactive since I moved to this one.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  I like the idea of paying to downvote, but also an interesting effect of downvotes is that they skew views of a position. Having one upvote and 100 downvotes is the same as having 401 upvotes and 500 downvotes. Isn't that odd? One is a comment everyone hates and the other is a comment almost half of all people like.
  • clairity 6y ago
    what you're getting at is that both the mean and the variance have information (they're independent variables), which is good to keep in mind. on hn, both of your examples would be at -4 (dead) with no way of differentiating the two.
  • jodrellblank 6y ago
    > "I like the idea of paying to downvote" This reads to me like charging people to pick up trash while they're out walking. Voting is a mini-act of trying to improve the site for others by sweeping trash comments down and out of others' way and lifting good comments up to prominence; who would pay to do that? Who would think it reasonable to expect people to pay to do it?
• fluidcruft 6y ago
  One thing I noticed recently about HN voting is that it seems like you can upvote but cannot downvote immediate replies to your own comments. Other users can still downvote the comments. When I noticed that it struck me as very clever and something reddit should immediately poach. It's like a built-in cooling off period.
• asimjalis 6y ago
  I feel like Hacker News leaderboard was a lot more interesting in the 2000s than it is now. Can anyone put their finger on why this is?
  • hobonate 6y ago
    I just downvoted your comment. ***FAQ*** What does this mean? The amount of karma (points) on your comment and Red-I mean "hacker" "news" 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 Posters, *Spreading incorrect information, *Sarcasm not correctly flagged with a `/s`. Am I banned from the HN? 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. If you accrue enough down-votes, dang will be forced to hellban or IP-ban you, which will completely and permanently prevent you from using the website whatsoever (until you get another account and IP which takes like 2 minutes). 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 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 news.ycombinator.com. I will continue to issue downvotes until you improve your conduct. Remember: HN is privilege, not a right.*
• gweinberg 6y ago
  Personally I'd prefer if comments displayed upvotes and downvotes as separate tallies instead of a total. It means something very different if a post as a lot of up and down votes that sum to about zero or if it has no votes at all.
  • cheschire 6y ago
    Imgur is a great example of this at work.
• jasode 6y ago
  I think a critical missing context of reposting an old 2009 article is that a newer post in 2011 makes downvotes free instead of costing reputation: >Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... Why? He saw that users were too hesitant in downvoting which allowed bad content to grow and further degraded the site. Changing the downvoting mechanics fixed that. (I don't know if there's been an update since 2011 to the downvoting system and incentives.)
  • blargpls 6y ago
    Downvotes on questions are free, downvotes on answers cost 1 reputation (see https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reputation-work/7238#7238 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7237/how-does-reput...).
    • type0 6y ago
      Ah, this explains why it gets more and more outdated.
• williesleg 6y ago
  Reminds me of all those yes people.
• endisneigh 6y ago
  I just wish you could remove the number next to your name natively in HN. It can't seriously take more than 5 minutes to implement this. There's no excuse IMHO. I want to interact with the site without seeing the number change and wondering why it did.
  • oehpr 6y ago
    I can sympathize. I used to have a filter for reddit to eliminate the tally because I didn't like the effect it had on me. I think the thing is though, HN and reddit don't give you options to remove these numbers because they have an effect. It's the nudge they give to people to adjust their contributions to be something the community actually wants. No shock these services are not offering options to turn that nudge off. It might be nice of them to give the tally as class to make it easy to filter with a userstyle, though.
• gwbas1c 6y ago
  I don't know if these are popular opinions or not: 1: I really wish I could downvote Hacker News articles. 2: I really wish there was some friction to downvoting. Perhaps something like choosing among: disagree, factually wrong, mean, incoherent Regarding the downvoting of articles: For awhile I used to see a regular pattern of weird articles on the front page. The discussion would then predictably involve a mod defending the article. IMO, I think downvoting an article would help in this situation.
  • latortuga 6y ago
    Didn't slashdot have a feature kind of like this? Reasons why something was upvoted or downvoted alongside their score.
    • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Correct. SoylentNews goes one step further, and adds +0 agree and -0 disagree. I'm not sure if such votes have any real effect.
      • ryandrake 6y ago
        I love the idea of +0 for Agree and -0 for Disagree. A comment’s score should be about how high quality it is, not how popular it is or how many people agree with it. Keep a separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious. Leave actual negative scores for low quality things like spam, flamebait and harassment.
        • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
          > A comment’s score should be about how high quality it is, not how popular it is or how many people agree with it. It almost goes without saying, but that's how just about all online communities say the upvote/downvote buttons are to be used. Unfortunately no online community can be trusted to be mature enough to actually follow the rules. Not even HackerNews manages to robustly resist the downvoting of dissenting opinions. > Keep a separate agree/disagree count for users who are curious. That's an interesting idea, to my knowledge SoylentNews doesn't implement this. Having a two dimensional score, one for quality and one for popularity, might be effective in getting people not to abuse the quality feedback system.
• Scottopherson 6y ago
  I don't have the ability to downvote. Is it possible to undo an upvote? I sometimes upvote a comment by accident when viewing HN on mobile.
  • gnicholas 6y ago
    Downvoting is enabled when your karma reaches a threshold (500?). You can undo votes in either direction via the “unvote” or “undown” links that appear after voting. I think this is only possible for a short period of time after your original vote.
  • oehpr 6y ago
    Accidental upvotes used to be a problem, but that's been fixed for a while now. You should see the word "unvote" appear https://i.imgur.com/jaNanv9.png https://i.imgur.com/jaNanv9.png
  • blackshaw 6y ago
    Yes - after you upvote, a link that says "unvote" will appear above the comment. E.g. the following text currently appears to me above your comment: Scottopherson 5 minutes ago | unvote | parent | flag | favorite | on: The value of downvoting, or, how Hacker News gets ... Don't feel bad that you didn't notice - I was reading HN for a long time before I realised that un-upvoting was possible.
  • not_knuth 6y ago
    There should be a clickable "unvote" above the comment if you wish to do so. Regarding anything else about how Hacker News works, I found this quite useful: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...
  • kergonath 6y ago
    The UX is subpar on mobile. Too many tiny links too close to each other.
  • WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
    I guess there are a few more karma points to go for you. Not sure what the exact threshold is.
• amadeuspagel 6y ago
  > We’ve lost half the potential information. If a post has zero upvotes, does that mean it’s bad? incorrect? uninteresting? mediocre? There’s no way to tell, because zero has multiple meanings. Having downvotes doesn't fix this problem. You still loose information. If a post has zero upvotes, does that mean nobody cares, or a lot of people love it, and the same number hate it? The only site that gets this right is youtube: It shows both likes and dislikes.
  • wmichelin 6y ago
    I believe they're playing around with removing dislikes Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358992/youtube-hiding-dislikes-experiment-creator-review-bomb https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/30/22358992/youtube-hiding-d...
  • elboru 6y ago
    > The only site that gets this right is youtube: It shows both likes and dislikes. That might change soon: https://mobile.twitter.com/YouTube/status/1376942486594150405?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/YouTube/status/137694248659415040...
• dustinmoris 6y ago
  Kind of ironic because HN still remains one of the most interesting and engaging communities whereas StackOverflow has become pretty insignificant, outdated, stale and very hostile and unfriendly to new posters.
  • type0 6y ago
    It also has completely different use cases which makes the comparison a bit meaningless.
• massung 6y ago
  No system will be free of problems or gaming. But, doesn't hacker news actually have implicit down voting by way of time? HN isn't designed to be a searchable Q&A or forum. It's a "what's a currently popular" site. If something isn't good, it just disappears faster than the opposite. Have I wished I could down vote things sometimes? Sure. But then I just wait 5 minutes, refresh, and it's gone.
  • type0 6y ago
    Actually instead of counting down-votes HN software could just count how often a post was up-voted and then that vote regretted (reversed) and adjust the visibility to boost or silence. But that is still susceptible to misuse so there should be a limit on how often that would count.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• ddevault 6y ago
  Hacker News gets it most wrong with the flagging system, which is ripe for abuse (and is constantly abused). I sent this to dang some time ago, and was met with a muted response: I realized something interesting the other day - users gain access to downvote comments once they reach 501 karma. I've always inferred that this is to make it so that users cannot downvote until they have demonstrated some understanding of the community and an ability to fit in with its norms. However... users get access to flagging at 31 karma. A flag is basically a super downvote in several respects: - It works on comments and posts - It works on direct replies to your own comments - Just a few flags is enough to remove content entirely - A flagged post cannot be vouched for until after it's been removed, whereas a post can be upvoted before it's downvoted. It's a bit weird to me that the OP version of downvotes is available to users 16 times sooner than the neutered version. I feel like HN has a problem with flagging being abused for censorship - this might provide an explanation.
  • type0 6y ago
    Yeah, I think the guidelines should state that you can't just flag everything you disagree with, there should be consequences for that sort of behavior.
    • akerl_ 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173836 May be of interest to you, notably the part about flagging privileges being removed if somebody is misusing the feature.
• Oblouk 6y ago
  I think the content at HN is pretty good. Some other novel approaches I have seen includes upquest.com which has voting based on where you think the score is headed. I think (as others have mentioned) downvoting introduces issues like for example downvoting articles around the one article you want upvoted.
• hellbannedguy 6y ago
  To those of you addicted to Hacker News; I can offer this tip. Get a Hellban. It's not hard after all. I'll probally get hellbanned over this post? You will find you will still pruse HN, but very rarely will you feel the need to contribute. Your time here will decrease. Hacker News does not need much improvement. It does seem like it's on the back end of it's business cycle though, like all current social sites? I used business cycle because I don't know the word for a social site's decline. Decline is too harsh a word. Maybe predictable conversations, and a bit of a echo chamber, is more appripro? Hacker News is still the best site for scientific conversation on the the internet though. It seems like we have hashed out the important scientific stuff, and most issues computer related. I'm so greatfull to the hard nosed scientists whom hang here, and take umbridge to unsupported claims. I really do appreciate you guys. You know who you are. You are usually the first one to comment on a study's flaw, or whether the Placebo Effect is rearing it's magical head. Graham should add a few more moderators though. Never give too much power to one person, and an owner. This Plus--if Graham pays more Moderators, he could write off the added expence? It could be his gift to humanity? Oh yea, block a person, but do away with hellbanning. It's wimpy, passive aggressive, weak move. I understand moderation, but just block a person. Don't let them rattle on to open air. I would like to see a few more political discussions though. Not a lot, but some. Maybe one every other week? Expose the political fakers, and hypocrites. Expose the political hacks on both sides. Track every dime both parties bring in by way of Lobbiests?
  • disgrunt 6y ago
    For those of us unaware, what is a hellban?
    • krapp 6y ago
      It's a ban designed to make it appear to the banned user that they aren't banned. The intent is to allow them to continue to post (so they don't make a new account and avoid the ban) unaware that their posts are unreadable by the rest of the community. It works, but it's extremely controversial. It used to be the case that talking about it (and making banned users aware of their status) could get you banned here, and vouching for banned users wasn't available until relatively recently. Some users have only discovered they were banned years after the fact.
• jcims 6y ago
  I sometimes wonder if the simplicity of the upvote/downvote exposes it to the limbic decisioning, where some portion of the signal is pure lizard brain reaction vs a thoughtful act to help moderate the community.
• Koshkin 6y ago
  Ars Technica got this right.
• ggggtez 6y ago
  This is a very confusing post after you take into account that the author misunderstood that actually you can downvote comments.
• amelius 6y ago
  Speaking of shortcomings, how do people remove their account including all of their comments? (Not saying that I want to remove my account of course, but perhaps one day I might) EDIT: some discussion on this topic appeared here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16898422
• kodah 6y ago
  I've been downvoted to [dead] before, though I've never gotten mad about it. One trend I have noticed is that on HN you won't necessarily be downvoted for your idea but you definitely will be downvoted for how you present it. If you come off as vitriolic or angry, you can expect a proportionate response. Frustration seems to be tolerated intermittently.
  • TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
    You can definitely be downvoted for ideas here. Comments that go significantly against the political norms of the site seem particularly prone to this.
    • rocqua 6y ago
      Whilst that us true, I think many of these comments are combative, argumentative, or implying more than arguing. I think a thoughtful and compassionate but unfavored argument here will not be downvoted to death. That is a higher standard than what the accepted political stances face. But it feels better than what is achieved in any other place.
    • tremon 6y ago
      In my experience it's really the presentation more than the idea. I rarely see a well-reasoned post get modded down. It's usually snipes, sarcasm (my own guilty pleasure, I admit), or a poster repeating the exact same argument multiple times without engaging any of the counterarguments.
    • bscphil 6y ago
      > Comments that go significantly against the political norms of the site seem particularly prone to this. Agree, but notably, the political norms of the site are not distinctively left or right wing. There are any number of opinions that will get you downvoted here (unless your comment flies under the radar), and it really does not matter how thoughtful you are about it. Example 1 (right wing): opposing gay marriage or abortion rights, opposing taxes, support for Donald Trump Example 2 (left wing): anti-capitalist views, arguing that Richard Stallman should be removed, general anti-startup culture sentiment, (usually) opposing Elon Musk / Tesla Example 3 (which side gets downvoted depends on who's awake): your opinion of Brandon Eich, universal basic income, your opinion of Apple (particularly socio-economic), unions It's really not that surprising; the median Hacker News user is a white American man, wealthier and younger than average, with moderate liberal political views that skew libertarian on social issues. That's a "norm" of discourse even if it doesn't fit perfectly on the American Republican / Democrat spectrum.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  It's kind of amusing that the entire premise of this article is undone by the aside: > update: Apparently it is possible to downvote comments, which I never realized. But while downvotes seem useful for comments where there's a lot more scope for false information, trolling, etc., I'm not sure what the additional value would be for posts -- they're either popular or not, and you can still flag posts that are actively harmful. And then this: > Is it realistic for users to expect to post in an environment where there are no penalties at all, no way for their peers to express disapproval or disagreement with their post? Huh? Peers express disapproval and disagreement by commenting within the post. As I am doing precisely right now. ;) Jeff Atwood is a super-smart guy who's done amazing things but this particular piece leaves me quite baffled.
  • jokab 6y ago
    Upvoted :)
  • harpiaharpyja 6y ago
    The content of the article still stands if you take it about social voting systems in general. I guess you can apply it to like... Twitter or something.
    • busymom0 6y ago
      The content will soon apply to YouTube too as they are removing the dislike counts. Though YouTube is much different from HN.
  • Hiopl 6y ago
    I'm also baffled by his position. I often think that downvotes on HN serve to reinforce conformism to an accepted set of values and ideas. Which might be okay if, say, you want to "immunize" a community against racism, sexism or fake information, but isn't great if issues (as in politics or even in tech on a social level) are a lot more nuanced and there might be plenty of room to explore ideas off the beaten path (and no, I don't mean inane stuff like "but masks don't work" or "but it's just like the flu"). It's easy to find yourself on the receiving end of endless downvotes for something that isn't offensive but clashes with the accepted HN narrative. It makes me wish downvotes weren't a thing. I'm okay with flagging, since I mostly see comments flagged that clearly break HN's simple rules.
• cryptoz 6y ago
  I used to read Coding Horror but stopped paying attention to Jeff Atwood after his anti-coding rant. He repeatedly insisted that "learning to code" is a really dumb thing to do unless you intend to make a career out of it. A really shocking opinion that I was surprised to hear from him, and made me lose all respect for his coding-related opinions.
  • prichino 6y ago
    At least he has opinions. The "everyoness must code" folk sometimes do sound like markov-generated text. Funny that you hold his coding opinions in less respect for what is most decidedly a not coding-related opinion. Substitute coding for "advanced mathematics", "investment banking", "nursing". Would you lose respect for a professional nurse's nursing opinions if he said learning to nurse is a really dumb thing to do unless you intend to make a career out of it?
    • vcxy 6y ago
      Not the parent commenter, but kinda, yeah. Saying that it's stupid to learn x if you aren't going to monetize comes off poorly to me. So does saying that everyone should learn x. I don't understand either view. Is it weird to have an interest in nursing and learn about it but not be interested in monetizing it? Sure, it could be. Is it dumb? No.
    • jacobr1 6y ago
      An alternative analogy would be "learning first-aid is a dumb thing to do unless you become a medical professional." I wouldn't lose respect, but it is a narrow view, and one worthy of debate. "Programming" is such a powerful tool for everyone to interact with technology and we could do a better job exposing programatic abstractions. Think of how many people use spreadsheets with complex expressions. Is that that not also programming?
      • whatshisface 6y ago
        The problem is that basically every profession contains some parts that basically everyone could benefit in their daily lives from knowing. Chemistry, mechanical engineering, finance, accounting, law, sales... programming is just one item on a list of thousands of things that would be nice to know. It's not reasonable to hold it up above the rest when all of the other ones also deal with things modern life runs on. If there's a message I can get behind, it's "learn more than school taught you, and keep learning after graduation," but holding up one subject above the rest on the grounds of its importance seems a little flimsy when they're all that important. So, all of the things you could be learning on your down time are about equal. If programming has a high place, it's a high place shared among all the rest. Knowledge does have a high place, after all.
• arnaudsm 6y ago
  I love the analogy that capping downvote values is like an ELU activation function in machine learning. Whereas Reddit uses TanH.
• ergot_vacation 6y ago
  Belief in Downvoting seems to be an artifact of idealistic naivete (that I used to have as well), in the same way as enthusiastic, unquestioning belief in the writings of Ayn Rand, Karl Marx etc (not calling anyone out, everyone was a teenager once). Downvotes SEEM good on paper. In the real world, they're garbage because they're never used as intended. Nearly every implementation of downvotes assumes they will be used as a way for ordinary users to moderate bad content, and that this power will not be abused. The reality is that we've known mob rule was a terrible idea since at least the Enlightenment era, and probably much earlier. But apparently we need to keep re-discovering it. There is a certain kind of person that mostly likes to attack and destroy, in any given situation. Not for any good reason, but simply because they like conflict. Give them a downvote, and they'll latch on to it and destroy communities. Give them only an upvote and they'll lose interest and go cause problems somewhere else. Moderation is for moderators. Users cannot, and should not, be trusted with it.
• kjrose 6y ago
  Except, of course, you can downvote comments. So umm. Kinda missing the mark eh?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• thrower123 6y ago
  Hiding posts is incredibly useful. It's a good way to keep the blood pressure in an acceptable range. I keep thinking that a script or an extension to auto-hide stories from blacklisted domains on the front page would greatly improve my experience. The beauty of hiding, though, is that it only impacts my experience. If people want to discuss and vote up things I find uninteresting, they can have at it, and I don't have to know anything about it.
• peterfield 6y ago
  Like most comments here - I am a bit divided about the relevance and even the rationale of this article. That said it has given me a different twist on a sentiment I have been dealing with for a long time: I'm French but have emigrated to the English-speaking world 15+years ago (NZ, AU, USA). I have found the whole experience very challenging in terms of career management. Assessing my own progresses is something I really struggle with. For years, I was sub-conscientiously blaming my language skills (I have the worst French accent ever - when I meet new people they often ask me "when did you land" as I sound like a Tourist in a city I've lived for years lol). I have since acquired more confidence language-wise, but it did not solve my 'confusion' (a la Travolta 404). I realized that what I was lacking was the negative feedback loop. I haven't had a long career in France before emigrating, but I had been through a large variety of student/casual jobs and a few short term engineering and project/program management roles. Enough to get accustomed to a French "professional context" in which I recall having professional reviews where negative feedback was given formally, and open discussions where employees would criticize the proposal made by a manager, or when a supplier was late in delivering - loud words would be exchanged on the phone. I haven't seen any of these in the past 15 years. Political correctness rules. Last time my temper took over and I inadvertently let a bit of my irritation be heard on the phone with a late supplier - they literally clammed down and it just added to the late schedule another 10 days of silence from them until they delivered. To quote Jeff Atwood - this is exactly the feeling I have at work sometime: "If a post has zero upvotes, does that mean it’s bad? incorrect? uninteresting? mediocre? There’s no way to tell, because zero has multiple meanings. [...] Downvotes give you the critically important ability to distinguish between the good, the bad, and the ugly. Without downvotes, how can you possibly tell the difference between a post that is harmless but uninteresting, and one that is actually wrong or harmful?" Am I hallucinating ? I'd be curious to here about other emigrants/multicultural peeps' experience here.
• zw123456 6y ago
  I never comment on HN anymore, because, ironically, a site ostensibly promoting innovative thinking actually discourages it with mechanized "group think". And ironically I am breaking my rule to never comment, on the completely off chance the observation might sink in. FYI, the down button is right there, don't hesitate, you wouldn't dare want to ever take input that you don't completely agree with. Last post ever, no really this time :)
  • zw123456 6y ago
    OK, I will try one more time, but this is super obvious. Simple: If you downvote you have to give a reason, you cannot simply downvote, I can write a script to downvote every post on here everyday. You have to provide a reason for the down vote, and your reason can be upvoted or downvoted, but they have to give a reason which can be up or down voted and so on. If you up vote, you have to give a reason, and your reason can be up or down voted but that up or down vote has to have a reason that can be up or down voted and so on. Recursion. Get it? I don't understand why a site populated but programmers did not think of it, I have suggested it like a million times and it gets down voted, again for no reason given, for all we know a bot is doing it. It is sort of an obvious thing, I am probably not going to try again because it is just too annoying. Good bye.
• oblib 6y ago
  Personally, I think the "karma" and up/down voting of comments is a cool feature but they need to be taken with a grain of salt. It's fun to see a submission get upvoted and get karma points and disappointing to see one get buried, and frustrating to see a post get buried and than another covering the same topic go big, but taken in perspective to what's truly important the points are trivial. The main reason I visit HN most days, and generally several times a day, is to find something interesting and most days I do, and some of what I find and learn here is important. I never come here looking for stuff to down vote. That's kind of hard to even imagine because you'd almost have to pass over the interesting and important to do that. Be interesting to be able to see how many down votes a user has made. That could make one a bit less trigger happy.
• twirlock 6y ago
  Hacker news gets it wrong by letting some clown go around moderating for viewpoint.
• devilduck 6y ago
  It's cool how defensive people get about this stupid news aggregator. I love to see it
• rootusrootus 6y ago
  IMO that seems like a comment that hasn't aged too well. HN remains effective more than 10 years after that, and although he may have studied HN while building Stack Overflow, I don't think it's safe to say that SO has done as well.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Downvotes should be weighted by the voter history, e.g. someone who just downvotes should have vote weight say than someone who is more balanced.
• kwdc 6y ago
  I find the "I disagree with you so I'll downvote you" approach to comments is quite useless. Should require a comment in the very least if you have any concept of adding value. Especially in political discussions I've seen. Its blatantly obvious someone is downvoting simply because they disagree. That should be trackable and that type of action flaggable in itself. But I understand the overhead it would create. Flagging without reason is likely equally obnoxious. If the downvoted person nas to wonder about the reason "why?" then the system isn’t helping. I've seen plenty of faded out, non-snarky, non-trolling comments that were actually on-topic and relevant. But enough people didn't agree. Making them hard to read just means I now apply a extension to find out why it is being blocked. Often the faded out comment is informative specifically because it annoyed or offended someone who disagreed. Looking back at some of my own comments that were downvoted, I have no idea why it happened. I asked others for their opinion. They have no idea either. So what was their intent? I literally don't know why. No self reflection occurs because there's no clear reason.
• airhead969 6y ago
  The other big issue is the ambiguity of the vote: dis/approval, dis/agreement, or low-/high-signal? I think agreement and interesting (signal) need separate votes. It could also be nice to have a hilarity vote that can be de-prioritized, allowing optional entertainment value without shunning it completely. Also, flagging should be reserved for absolutely deplorable comments, not microaggressions or score-settling.
• platz 6y ago
  Imagine a stock market without shorting
• dgreensp 6y ago
  Jeff’s 2009 argument against HN is a theoretical one, and IMO wrong. He points at a system that works well (HN), and says it “gets it wrong,” for made-up and unproven reasons. Paul’s point about not being Reddit, I think, is you need good moderation, and you need to be willing to block and ban. Despite this, Jeff assumes HN limits downvoting in order to not hurt people’s feelings or something, which is a total straw man or non sequitur. From my armchair, I gather that good communities require good moderation, so if you are trying to scale moderation, that’s your work right there, and a downvoting mechanism doesn’t take the place of that. Ideally mods are people who have organically earned trust and power or are known and trusted by other mods or leaders. Karma scores alone don’t cut it. The mods can use tools to be more efficient and not require an army. If you are running a site that relies on mods, you need a good relationship with your mods and to give them good tools and guidelines.
• 0x0203 6y ago
  What I find interesting is that users voting on other's comments seems to have become the assumed best way of organizing user-generated content. In my mind, I think the question isn't "do we allow or disallow down votes," but "should we even let users vote?" My impression is that voting systems ultimately end up as popularity counters, and that in and of itself can skew the motivations of participants. Additionally, there's motivation to maliciously hide opposing viewpoints, late-comers rarely get to meaningfully participate due to their "score" starting lower than longer lived and thus higher scored content, and well-intentioned discussion about contentious or nuanced topics can easily get buried. What the "best" way of sorting user content is will surely depend on the goals of the platform, but if deep, informative discussion is the goal, maybe using a popularity contest isn't the right strategy? Perhaps giving the users choices of sorting by new/old, most/least discussion, most/fewest replies, etc... might be a better option? And/or some other non-vote driven method? Of course you'll still need good moderation and a way to flag inappropriate content where a user's ability to flag is kept in check by some combination of the length of time that user has been active, his/her level of participation with the platform, and the number flags said user has received, but overall I suspect this would keep the general user's focus on having actually productive discussion instead of trying to get that dopamine hit from making a well-liked comment. I should also say that I've been mostly pretty pleased with the quality of discussions on HN and I appreciate the good moderation and the general populace's desire to share quality information/opinions/thoughts. But I do wonder what will happen if it becomes "too" popular and if there are things that could be done to keep that focus on quality discussions even in the face of a massive influx of users.
• pwr33 6y ago
  "It’s pretty clear now that the broken windows theory applies to community sites as well. The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur. I was living in New York when Giuliani introduced the reforms that made the broken windows theory famous, and the transformation was miraculous. And I was a Reddit user when the opposite happened there, and the transformation was equally dramatic." Paul Graham is such a tool. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24099192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24099192 Somebody should delete this dumpster fire of a website, perhaps a real "hacker" might take the initiative some day!
• robomartin 6y ago
  Interesting article. From my perspective HN voting, for the most part, works very well. I've been on online discussion groups since the days of USENET. HN is great. What really bothers me is zero information down-votes and the "downvote army" as someone called it in this thread. Nobody learns anything from this at all. What's the value when a downvote carries no consequences whatsoever for the voter while delivering a penalty to the author? One idea I had a while ago is that a downvote should cost the person money in the form of karma. Want to down vote? It'll cost you ten points. No problem. The point of this idea is that a down-vote out of spite or just to pile on someone or an idea is a bad thing. People who behave that way with some consistency would have to give up more and more for each downvote. Paying for a downvote with karma could be an interesting evolutionary solution for downvote abuse, particularly if the cost increases based on a range of criteria. You downvote a comment on a thread and it cost you 10 karma, you continue to downvote the same author on the same thread and it cost you more each time. If people are piling one, the cost goes up. Etc.
• jokoon 6y ago
  I thought about making an aggregator when you can only downvote, so that only "surviving" posts would appear. In general most users don't upvote because they're not sure they agree with a post or article or really want it to have more visibility. But I'm betting that most users would prefer to express their disagreement or negative sentiment if it was the only option, and say nothing about things they agree with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminationism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminationism
• heywherelogingo 6y ago
  The downvoting works so well that there has to be a specific rule against complaining about it. That's an admission.
• mbrodersen 6y ago
  It would be interesting to have a downvote system where the downvote is added as a comment, giving the downvoter an opportunity to say why the post was downvoted. And also give anybody else an opportunity to downvote the downvote itself (with comment). In other words, downvoting a post might impact you if your downvote is downvoted.