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I think slashdot’s voting system was well equipped to avoid that problem, but they faded anyway. Maybe it was the redesign? I think many of their innovations in

I think slashdot’s voting system was well equipped to avoid that problem, but they faded anyway. Maybe it was the redesign? I think many of their innovations in 1999 would go a long way to resolve political downvoting today—-new accounts were unable to vote on comments, you were unable to vote and comment in the same posts, metamoderation to ensure fairness, and up or downvotes having to fit categories like ‘insightful’ or ‘offtopic’.

TheManInThePub 5y ago
Frankly, I couldn't agree with this more. I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will become another reddit.
- robocat 5y ago
  > down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. Every tool will be abused sometimes. I think the voting system mostly works extremely well - the system needs to be viewed as a whole with all the compromises that includes, rather than drill down on one particular failure. Sometimes people use voting for bad reasons — I know I have (though I am quite conscientious to try and learn to vote more carefully).
- joseluisq 5y ago
  Agree. And yes, privilege just uncontroversial standpoints or promote indirect pressure over the members will result in community fragmentation. Therefore HN could turn into "one of many" monotone sites to just pass around.
- II2II 5y ago
  I suspect that events outside of HN would have more of a chilling effect than the environment of HN itself. I know there are times when I felt like presenting a contrary view on a story but did not. I suspect that a fair number of HN members may even accept those points of view. Yet I have also seen enough of those "conversations" to know that they rapidly go downhill.
- ROARosen 5y ago
  > I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. It is not possible to download posts on HackerNews, no matter how many karma you have. Did you mean comments? Because I think that actually one of the strongests points of HN that all posts will get equal footing. (they can be flagged though)
- ascar 5y ago
  > I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo The best thing to do here is for the community to step in and actively up-vote unfairly downvoted comments.
  - FooHentai 5y ago
    I try and do that but often the comment is full dead and can’t be upvoted.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Isn’t there supposed to be a vouch system? I’ve seen comments that were flagged to death that shouldn’t have been (and a lot more vice versa) but I never seem to see the vouch link whether I have showdead on or not.
    - a1369209993 5y ago
      Not sure if it matches your problem, but FWIW, vouch only seems to show up for comments that already dead (not just flagged and downvoted).
    - bscphil 5y ago
      I see the vouch link, but only when I click on the permalink to the comment.
  - mbrodersen 5y ago
    Agree. I do this all the time.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I've noticed that when I comment against the status quo, my comments quickly dip to -2 or lower from rapid fire downvotes, then slowly tick upward into positive territory over time as the more patient readers come through. It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal. Maybe give less weight to someone who rapid-fire downvotes comments faster than they could possibly read them?
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    > It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal. Perversely, downvotes aren't available on comments older than 24 hours, but upvotes are, so comments that attract a mixture of up- and down-votes get a strong upward bias on votes they attract after a day (since the upvotes happen and the downvotes don't). Not sure how relevant that effect is to more short-term issues, though.
    - type0 5y ago
      It does make the downvotes irrelevant in a way, it only signals strong disagreement which I think it's good to know. But it's not good to interpret the downvotes as correction method for yourself because it only leads to more echochamber.
      - a1369209993 5y ago
        > But it's not good to interpret the downvotes as correction method for yourself because it only leads to more echochamber. Oh certainly, it's just that this seems eqally applicable to upvotes, hence why the asymmetry seems perverse.
    - angry_octet 5y ago
      Except that once enough negative votes have been received it becomes impossible to upvote. It's like sumo -- pushed too far and it goes out. However, the number is much too small, 3 or 4 downvotes. Flagging operates similarly; as there is no reason attached to the flag it is simply 'dislike'. Slashdot's tags were much more nuanced.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Agreed, though personally I think that the complement is also true, and maybe more insidious: A lot of comments get upvoted because they state an uncontroversial, obvious position that everybody agrees with already. This is insidious because it encourages people to be the first to say the least interesting thing in order to get rewarded with comment karma. Those comments bubble up to the top of the thread, where they're held aloft by more and more people who see their existing opinions restated. Ultimately the reward structure encourages discussions where people are indulged, in the same way the punishment structure discourages people being challenged. I'd say this effect is more pronounced on Reddit than HN, but you can see it here too. I'm not looking for "edgy" comments, I'm just saying that it's more useful in the long run to upvote comments that provide new information or perspectives, or at least state a common sense position in a different, compelling way.
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    Some of my stupidest posts get upvoted through the roof. Posts which I put in a lot of work on? Mixed bag. Partly this is a first-poster thing. If you post early, then you'll either get a lot of up or down votes. Take time to post, and well, might get nothing.
artificialLimbs 5y ago
A lot of people were pretty upset about the redesign. They also sold to Conde Nast and started adopting a different (more intrusive) model of advertising. I can't remember details but the site started feeling more.... slimey over time. Slashdot's commenting/moderation system was exceptional. Grateful to HN for the excellence of theirs.
benlivengood 5y ago
Slashdot got popular and the insightful comments got drowned out by Funny+5 because it's low effort karma building that feels like being popular. I learned my lesson and try to only inject humor into otherwise useful comments on HN.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  This is one of those things that I did not realize kills discourse until I experienced a community that mainly posts serious content and discussion. Reddit now is particularly bad as each thread is sea of quips, one-liners, and trashtalk which pretty much floods out the pond of interesting discussion. "Funny" can be a great thing, but if that's all anyone ever tries to offer, it becomes very tiresome.
  - anaerobicover 5y ago
    I agree. Cheap/stupid jokes mostly get downvoted here, and it's one of the things I like about HN!
    - mattmanser 5y ago
      To be fair to reddit, there are plenty of subreddits that have similar policies (e.g. /r/science). It works most of the time apart from when a particular post ends up x-posted or on /r/popular or something similar.
- noizejoy 5y ago
  My memory is fuzzy on my slashdot days, but wasn’t there a way to filter the funny suff?
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    The Outstanding filter seems to just show Insightful and Interesting comments.
  - joquarky 5y ago
jcpham2 5y ago
Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin mining in 2011 or so and then I woke up and a) started applying the time value of money to a lot of things and b) stopped having intellectual discussions on the open internet. That is very real truth that according to the current narrative taking place in the comments here, many of you will downvote what I am saying because you don’t like... whatever it is you don’t like. I have had children and paid off two mortgages since then. Explaining my point of view to the mob no longer has value to me.
- krageon 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I would normally downvote this post because it essentially opens with "I'm absolutely right", goes straight into "I will be downvoted" and closes with "I don't need attention". What is the point of that? All that you've come here to say is apparently that you don't need to be read and you're successful regardless of what anyone thinks. Great, I'm happy for you. What value have you added to this conversation? You're not helping on an emotional level and intellectually I'm really struggling to see the insight I'm supposed to be deriving from this as well.
Cd00d 5y ago
Personally, I left slashdot when I felt the community changed. It started to feel less like excitement, and more like cranky libertarians complaining. I remember CmdrTaco leaving the helm, so maybe it was his steering that kept it good to me? No idea. When I gave up on slashdot I put a call out to my social circle for a replacement, and that's how I learned about HN! That was nearly a decade ago, and I'm still grateful!
klyrs 5y ago
I dunno about everybody else, but there were about 15 years where every single story had several trolls commenting purely for the purpose of dropping a racial slur. Meta-moderate for long enough, and you could occasionally earn 5 karma, which could easily get blown on downvoting stupid shit from a single story. It was a cesspool, and I think a lot of people left because of that. They started a really good thing with the user moderation, I think meta-moderation and the vote-category dropdown are very smart, but they locked it down too hard and moderation was largely ineffective.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  I’m not a fan of meta moderation. It lacks context. I upvoted or downvoted for reasons and without knowing that reason how can someone determine whether that was appropriate? When I metamoderated I was extremely forgiving for the same reason. Unless it was clear abuse I “okayed” it. Incidentally at some point I stopped getting moderation points even though I was a frequent meta moderator. Whether that was due to meta moderation of my mods, I don’t know. There were rumors of a blacklist and there was a thread which was closed down critical of either an admin or the site. I participated in the thread rather moderately IIRC, but that was around the time I never saw another mod point. At least on HN, dang will tell you what he didn’t like about your behavior. dang is also outwardly cool with disagreeing with him, which isn’t true with everyone.
- thu2111 5y ago
  I think that stuff was not a reflection on forums or moderation in general but specific to the time that Slashdot was born in. Rob Malda had a very strong pro free-speech stance and so the site developed this odd sub-culture early on that was very self-referential and filled with Slashdot specific memes. In fact Slashdot had memes before memes even became a widely used word. Natalie Portman+hot grits etc. I think it attracted people who enjoyed the thrill of being able to "publish" anything at all. I am very skeptical those people actually said those sorts of things or even believed them in real life, because most of the racial troll posts were almost entirely template and extremely repetitive in meme-like ways, most of them were barely coherent: they weren't people genuinely trying to convince anyone of anything. There was a second factor that I suspect was also 'encouraging' trolls at this time: Slashdot's combination of "We never delete a post for any reason", allowing anonymous comments and a very sophisticated moderation system turned it into a game for some people. There were people who just enjoyed trying to break the site by doing things that you don't see on any other forum. For instance there was a period where people kept coming up with creative abuses of Unicode to construct page widening posts, stuff like that. You had a lot of creative programmer types faced with something that was an utterly pure system, designed to stop abuse with no human-level decisions to beat, and no legal penalties for trying. So it turned into a form of lightweight hacking practice, both machine and social, without any actual legal risk. These days people who enjoy finding exploits in computer systems for the sheer thrill of it have plenty of more profitable outlets, like the zero day hunt programs run by big companies. If someone were to try creating a new Slashdot and recapturing the glory days I think they'd be faced with a totally different set of problems.

TheManInThePub 5y ago

Frankly, I couldn't agree with this more. I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. If this is allowed to go on, people will be afraid of making controversial (but intelligent) posts, and this place will become another reddit.

robocat 5y ago
> down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. Every tool will be abused sometimes. I think the voting system mostly works extremely well - the system needs to be viewed as a whole with all the compromises that includes, rather than drill down on one particular failure. Sometimes people use voting for bad reasons — I know I have (though I am quite conscientious to try and learn to vote more carefully).
joseluisq 5y ago
Agree. And yes, privilege just uncontroversial standpoints or promote indirect pressure over the members will result in community fragmentation. Therefore HN could turn into "one of many" monotone sites to just pass around.
II2II 5y ago
I suspect that events outside of HN would have more of a chilling effect than the environment of HN itself. I know there are times when I felt like presenting a contrary view on a story but did not. I suspect that a fair number of HN members may even accept those points of view. Yet I have also seen enough of those "conversations" to know that they rapidly go downhill.
ROARosen 5y ago
> I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo. It is not possible to download posts on HackerNews, no matter how many karma you have. Did you mean comments? Because I think that actually one of the strongests points of HN that all posts will get equal footing. (they can be flagged though)
ascar 5y ago
> I've seen intelligent and insightful HN posts down voted simply because they went against the status-quo The best thing to do here is for the community to step in and actively up-vote unfairly downvoted comments.
- FooHentai 5y ago
  I try and do that but often the comment is full dead and can’t be upvoted.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Isn’t there supposed to be a vouch system? I’ve seen comments that were flagged to death that shouldn’t have been (and a lot more vice versa) but I never seem to see the vouch link whether I have showdead on or not.
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    Not sure if it matches your problem, but FWIW, vouch only seems to show up for comments that already dead (not just flagged and downvoted).
  - bscphil 5y ago
    I see the vouch link, but only when I click on the permalink to the comment.
- mbrodersen 5y ago
  Agree. I do this all the time.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I've noticed that when I comment against the status quo, my comments quickly dip to -2 or lower from rapid fire downvotes, then slowly tick upward into positive territory over time as the more patient readers come through. It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal. Maybe give less weight to someone who rapid-fire downvotes comments faster than they could possibly read them?
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > It would be interesting to see if time-weighting the votes somehow could improve the signal. Perversely, downvotes aren't available on comments older than 24 hours, but upvotes are, so comments that attract a mixture of up- and down-votes get a strong upward bias on votes they attract after a day (since the upvotes happen and the downvotes don't). Not sure how relevant that effect is to more short-term issues, though.
  - type0 5y ago
    It does make the downvotes irrelevant in a way, it only signals strong disagreement which I think it's good to know. But it's not good to interpret the downvotes as correction method for yourself because it only leads to more echochamber.
    - a1369209993 5y ago
      > But it's not good to interpret the downvotes as correction method for yourself because it only leads to more echochamber. Oh certainly, it's just that this seems eqally applicable to upvotes, hence why the asymmetry seems perverse.
  - angry_octet 5y ago
    Except that once enough negative votes have been received it becomes impossible to upvote. It's like sumo -- pushed too far and it goes out. However, the number is much too small, 3 or 4 downvotes. Flagging operates similarly; as there is no reason attached to the flag it is simply 'dislike'. Slashdot's tags were much more nuanced.
karaterobot 5y ago
Agreed, though personally I think that the complement is also true, and maybe more insidious: A lot of comments get upvoted because they state an uncontroversial, obvious position that everybody agrees with already. This is insidious because it encourages people to be the first to say the least interesting thing in order to get rewarded with comment karma. Those comments bubble up to the top of the thread, where they're held aloft by more and more people who see their existing opinions restated. Ultimately the reward structure encourages discussions where people are indulged, in the same way the punishment structure discourages people being challenged. I'd say this effect is more pronounced on Reddit than HN, but you can see it here too. I'm not looking for "edgy" comments, I'm just saying that it's more useful in the long run to upvote comments that provide new information or perspectives, or at least state a common sense position in a different, compelling way.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  Some of my stupidest posts get upvoted through the roof. Posts which I put in a lot of work on? Mixed bag. Partly this is a first-poster thing. If you post early, then you'll either get a lot of up or down votes. Take time to post, and well, might get nothing.

artificialLimbs 5y ago

A lot of people were pretty upset about the redesign. They also sold to Conde Nast and started adopting a different (more intrusive) model of advertising. I can't remember details but the site started feeling more.... slimey over time. Slashdot's commenting/moderation system was exceptional. Grateful to HN for the excellence of theirs.

benlivengood 5y ago

Slashdot got popular and the insightful comments got drowned out by Funny+5 because it's low effort karma building that feels like being popular. I learned my lesson and try to only inject humor into otherwise useful comments on HN.

DangitBobby 5y ago
This is one of those things that I did not realize kills discourse until I experienced a community that mainly posts serious content and discussion. Reddit now is particularly bad as each thread is sea of quips, one-liners, and trashtalk which pretty much floods out the pond of interesting discussion. "Funny" can be a great thing, but if that's all anyone ever tries to offer, it becomes very tiresome.
- anaerobicover 5y ago
  I agree. Cheap/stupid jokes mostly get downvoted here, and it's one of the things I like about HN!
  - mattmanser 5y ago
    To be fair to reddit, there are plenty of subreddits that have similar policies (e.g. /r/science). It works most of the time apart from when a particular post ends up x-posted or on /r/popular or something similar.
noizejoy 5y ago
My memory is fuzzy on my slashdot days, but wasn’t there a way to filter the funny suff?
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  The Outstanding filter seems to just show Insightful and Interesting comments.
- joquarky 5y ago

jcpham2 5y ago

Slashdot is where I learned about bitcoin mining in 2011 or so and then I woke up and a) started applying the time value of money to a lot of things and b) stopped having intellectual discussions on the open internet. That is very real truth that according to the current narrative taking place in the comments here, many of you will downvote what I am saying because you don’t like... whatever it is you don’t like. I have had children and paid off two mortgages since then. Explaining my point of view to the mob no longer has value to me.

krageon 5y ago
For what it's worth, I would normally downvote this post because it essentially opens with "I'm absolutely right", goes straight into "I will be downvoted" and closes with "I don't need attention". What is the point of that? All that you've come here to say is apparently that you don't need to be read and you're successful regardless of what anyone thinks. Great, I'm happy for you. What value have you added to this conversation? You're not helping on an emotional level and intellectually I'm really struggling to see the insight I'm supposed to be deriving from this as well.

Cd00d 5y ago

Personally, I left slashdot when I felt the community changed. It started to feel less like excitement, and more like cranky libertarians complaining. I remember CmdrTaco leaving the helm, so maybe it was his steering that kept it good to me? No idea. When I gave up on slashdot I put a call out to my social circle for a replacement, and that's how I learned about HN! That was nearly a decade ago, and I'm still grateful!

klyrs 5y ago

I dunno about everybody else, but there were about 15 years where every single story had several trolls commenting purely for the purpose of dropping a racial slur. Meta-moderate for long enough, and you could occasionally earn 5 karma, which could easily get blown on downvoting stupid shit from a single story. It was a cesspool, and I think a lot of people left because of that. They started a really good thing with the user moderation, I think meta-moderation and the vote-category dropdown are very smart, but they locked it down too hard and moderation was largely ineffective.

cgriswald 5y ago
I’m not a fan of meta moderation. It lacks context. I upvoted or downvoted for reasons and without knowing that reason how can someone determine whether that was appropriate? When I metamoderated I was extremely forgiving for the same reason. Unless it was clear abuse I “okayed” it. Incidentally at some point I stopped getting moderation points even though I was a frequent meta moderator. Whether that was due to meta moderation of my mods, I don’t know. There were rumors of a blacklist and there was a thread which was closed down critical of either an admin or the site. I participated in the thread rather moderately IIRC, but that was around the time I never saw another mod point. At least on HN, dang will tell you what he didn’t like about your behavior. dang is also outwardly cool with disagreeing with him, which isn’t true with everyone.
thu2111 5y ago
I think that stuff was not a reflection on forums or moderation in general but specific to the time that Slashdot was born in. Rob Malda had a very strong pro free-speech stance and so the site developed this odd sub-culture early on that was very self-referential and filled with Slashdot specific memes. In fact Slashdot had memes before memes even became a widely used word. Natalie Portman+hot grits etc. I think it attracted people who enjoyed the thrill of being able to "publish" anything at all. I am very skeptical those people actually said those sorts of things or even believed them in real life, because most of the racial troll posts were almost entirely template and extremely repetitive in meme-like ways, most of them were barely coherent: they weren't people genuinely trying to convince anyone of anything. There was a second factor that I suspect was also 'encouraging' trolls at this time: Slashdot's combination of "We never delete a post for any reason", allowing anonymous comments and a very sophisticated moderation system turned it into a game for some people. There were people who just enjoyed trying to break the site by doing things that you don't see on any other forum. For instance there was a period where people kept coming up with creative abuses of Unicode to construct page widening posts, stuff like that. You had a lot of creative programmer types faced with something that was an utterly pure system, designed to stop abuse with no human-level decisions to beat, and no legal penalties for trying. So it turned into a form of lightweight hacking practice, both machine and social, without any actual legal risk. These days people who enjoy finding exploits in computer systems for the sheer thrill of it have plenty of more profitable outlets, like the zero day hunt programs run by big companies. If someone were to try creating a new Slashdot and recapturing the glory days I think they'd be faced with a totally different set of problems.