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I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing yo

• spinax 5y ago
  It's especially bad on a site like HN - an account only gets a downvote capability if they've received what is it, 400 upvotes? - so you're assured that every downvote you receive is someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote (or are a serial link poster getting link karma upvotes). There is an echo chamber here based on how the downvote rules work, and I've watched people's comments get brigade downvoted in minutes for posting a well written post like yours which goes against what all the "cool kids" think. And unless you run at the mouth to become "liked", you don't get the chance to disagree with your own downvote.
  • bitexploder 5y ago
    HN has a certain discussion parameters and moderation system on purpose. The goal on HN isn’t to allow open ended discussions on all topics. I for one appreciate that we can talk computers and technology here and that the moderators keep the average level of the discussion high. If I want politics and other garbage I’ll go somewhere else. I have never experienced any issues here. Been here a looong time. Don’t be edgy and contribute positively to discussions with curiosity and you will do fine.
    • TchoBeer 5y ago
      There are many threads here about the politics of technology (big tech, open source vs closed source software, cryptocurrency and finance, the fabrication industry and China, etc) and there are also plenty of threads about politics unrelated or tangentially related to computers (off the top of my head, housing and homelessness, the schooling system, and climate change get discussed here not infrequently). HN isn't for just computers and technology, but rather for anything that sparks curiosity. With that being said, the moderation here is very excellent and generally keeps the quality of discussion somewhat high, so I agree with your central thesis.
      • bitexploder 5y ago
        I agree. I guess it’s just not dogmatic. Moderators and HNers are very strict about being constructive on more political topics.
        • bopbeepboop 5y ago
          That’s the story. In actuality, even factual and cited posts will get you shadowbanned if your opinion is contrary to the mainstream (on HN) narrative. I think it’s more “conforming” than “constructive”.
        • godshatter 5y ago
          Just for the record, the reply to this comment by bopbeepboop that was downvoted to "dead" status is a good example of the type of downvoting I disagree with. I also understand that this isn't my site, and that I have no control over the behavior of others on this site. I'm just putting that out there.
          • gus_massa 5y ago
            About bopbeepboop: The comment was not flagged, the account is banned. Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26735029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26735029 near the end of the tread, the post by dang A good trick is to go to the comment history, and search until you find the last streak of not dead comments. It's fine to vouch the [dead] comments (if they are fine), and enough vouch unkill the comment. In the case of bopbeepboop it looks like many of the comments were vouched.
  • sickcodebruh 5y ago
    I’ve been using HN for a few years now, mostly lurking but commenting every now and then, and I’m creeping up to the downvote privilege threshold. (I think it’s 500, not 400.) I wouldn’t describe myself as “someone who says lots of things other people like to upvote,” I think it’s more “someone who says little things over many years and some people have upvoted them here and there.” In other words, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that your description of HN matches everyone’s experience, and not everyone with downvote ability is the same type of person.
  • OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    I was thinking that the downvote brigade (to use a reddit term) is actually promulgating a type of ideological conformity litmus test on HN users. If you post/comment in a certain manner you get upvoted and break into the potential downvoters. Otherwise, you stay in purgatory of the middlings.
• bena 5y ago
  Every forum, every social media site, every community participation vehicle rewards one thing above all: time. Do I have time to make 4 or 5 burner accounts to enforce my votes? No. I have things to do. Do I have time to post ad nauseum about any given topic to make my point? No. I have things to do. And I'm sure you have things to do as well, so do a lot of people. But those that don't, have the thing we lack: time. And there's often reasons they have all that time. Often good reasons. And it's not because they're pleasant people.
  • acover 5y ago
    I've been thinking how to counter this effect. How to give power to the silent majority. I've been slowly writing a version of Reddit with an added level of moderation via direct democracy but made efficient by using proxy votes and statistical sampling. People with time and interest provide most is the content but moderation incentivizes behavior beneficial to the majority. It's a fools errand as it's a double-sided market but I feel the need.
    • bena 5y ago
      It probably is. Moderation itself is an attempt at a solution. And it is a solution on a small enough scale. But when you're literally dealing with moderating the entire world 24/7, there just aren't the resources to deal with that. You're attempting to automate that or kick that can back to the users. But just like here, just like reddit, just like StackOverflow, just like every single site that relies on community moderation that gets big, time beats all. It'll be fine for a while and you'll think you've solved the issue, but then you'll tip and become larger than you can socially manage. And those with the most time will skew your samples and votes.
      • esyir 5y ago
        I've always had this idea that reputation systems and enforced, systematic gatekeeping might be a way to build stronger communities. The fundamental issue of any fully open community is scale. From what I've seen, no online community really resists the swarm that comes when it goes viral. Whatever community that was there before, for all it's values and culture, gets replaced by the masses by sheer virtue of numbers.
• acover 5y ago
  Votes determine visibility. A post doesn't matter if it's not visible. A bad vote is more harmful than a bad comment. Bad comments get sorted. A bad vote makes the front page worse. Making votes visible makes the bad actors visible. Though I think other feedback mechanisms are better.
• Moodles 5y ago
  I wonder how much downvotes are to blame for the incredible political bias over on Reddit (just check out /r/politics). Or whether it would naturally occur without the downvotes anyway. I suspect downvotes exacerbate the problem but probably aren't the only cause.
  • goatlover 5y ago
    r/politics is a huge echo chamber. Occasionally you will see posts with thoughtful disagreement, but usually it’s extremely one sided with the top 100 comments all confirming each other.
• goodlinks 5y ago
  A comment disputing the post with its own upvotes seems a better representation. So original post states x (it can gather up votes that mean relevance). Then responses are posted, positive, negative, adding nuance - doesnt matter.. then those responses get up votes. Seems to me that everything can be done with positive re-inforcement. I would like to be able to filter out out votes though, maybe within a scope. So if you post x, someone disputes it with a comment that i disagree with that gets lots of upvotes.. i would like to be able to flag all those users as incompetent within that domain (this would just be my opinion and no one else would see it) then i can have two upvote scores: the masses, and the "competent in my eyes" masses. I know this isnt a full solution.. just putting ideas out there
• gus_massa 5y ago
  > then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got In HN you can send an email to the mods so they can take a look. Also the site may detect it automatically (the details are unclear, it's part of the secret sauce). > because I'm not sufficiently ideological Avoid political threads. Everyone is talking pass each other, and you will not convince anyone. Upvote grey comments if they are not offensive or very wrong, and run away before you get angry and want to start downvoting everyone. Try to stick to technical threads, preferably if they have less than 100 comments. You will be happier.
  • ulucs 5y ago
    > Avoid political threads. Coupled with the new catchphrase "everything is political", this is quite impossible to do.
    • cyberge99 5y ago
      I haven’t heard that new catchphrase to date. There’s an old joke about the Network OSI layer: What are layers 8 and 9? Political and Financial. I think the context with things like that refer to internal business politics and having diplomatic conversations versus State or National Politics. Avoid religion and politics in general seems like solid advice as it’s too emotionally charged for most people to discuss purely logically. (Also, there are too many x factors and most politicians are relatively short term (speaking of USA here).
    • state_less 5y ago
      The ground you walk on is not political. If folks learn to take it easy, we'll be in better shape.
    • JohnWhigham 5y ago
      everything is political Can't stand this phrase that literally came out of nowhere. People will try and justify it with walls of text about the oppressed, blah blah, when it's just an excuse for them to chide you about why you're wrong and why this issue intersects with their politics.
• codetrotter 5y ago
  > someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got I think the Reddit server software actually detects that kind of thing now and will make those votes not count. Likewise I think they’ve also made it so that a single comment alone that downvotes get piled onto will not hurt the account of the person that wrote it that much any longer.
  • ghostoftiber 5y ago
    For stories? Yes. For comments? They don't seem to care. Also the reddit bot mob is a very real thing and there's folks who enjoy evading those sorts of attempts at control. It becomes a game unto itself.
• aaaronic 5y ago
  Downvoting here on HN does seem pretty arbitrary. (Either that, or I just don't post quality comments/posts :D) I do know sites like HN attempt to identify patterns of voting like you described in order to remove abusive accounts, but I don't know how successful they are. I could see downvoting requiring a minimal amount of feedback being a possibility, like you can only downvote if you are posting a public reply as to why, being a system that might have some viability. As toxic as the internet can be, I am very happy the kinds of sites I work on don't allow anonymous users at all.
  • TchoBeer 5y ago
    Would it be better if you get down voted to hell and also get swamped with throwaway comments like "that's stupid"
    • underseacables 5y ago
      I think throwaway accounts should be banned, or at the very least, there should be a waiting period before you can comment. If you participate with thoughtful comments, you’ll reach 500 within a month. What bothers me is people creating these accounts on a whim just a throw out some garbage, or maybe a valid opinion, and then disappear in the night. If you had to wait a week to post it might lead to massive duplicate account creation, but I think it’s worth considering.
      • cesarb 5y ago
        > or at the very least, there should be a waiting period before you can comment. That wouldn't work that well for sites like this one where reading doesn't require an account. The moment one wants to create an account will most probably be the moment one wants to reply to a post or comment with a salient point; making it impossible to reply unless the account was created with forethought would just lead to the account never being created in the first place ("I would create an account to reply to this, but even if I create an account I cannot reply, so why bother?").
    • denton-scratch 5y ago
• blacktriangle 5y ago
  This really is an interesting problem, and I'm not sure if there's an answer. Sometimes I think the whole idea of HN/Reddit type sites is just doomed to ultimate failure. Dunbar's number is every bit as real in a digital space as it is in a physical space. I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. So instead of a global channel, your primary feed would come from your pod of 150ish that you would interact with more directly. This would mirror the concept of a village. Then maybe there would be another tier, the "region" if you will, where a single top post of the day from each village would get posted, then maybe a larger "nation" type area where the top post from each region over a week would get posted weekly. This system would let people spend most of their time with like-minded people, which is exactly what people want as exhibited by downvote behavior, but still allow for a degree of cross pollination of thought. Zoomed out, it seems like there really are two types of social media networks. The first is the hyper niche one where the entire conversation revovles around the topic and nothing but the topic. But once you leave your niche and become a more general site, cultural and idelogical alignment becomes a much bigger driver than topic and interest alignment.
  • MMS21 5y ago
    > I wonder if somebody built a social media site that was totally built around small communities. joinmastodon.org may interest you
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    Isn't that Reddit? I'm not sure you can cut a "village" over the internet population in any way that doesn't breed harmful behavior. Reddit is on the most harmless end of those possibilities, but it causes problems there too. Anyway, is it for irony sake that people downvoted your comment?
    • blacktriangle 5y ago
      My guess is it was downvoted for calling out that what people really want is to be in a bubble of likeminded culturally similar people. I don't see a problem with this behavior, it just looks like basic human nature to me. But I think some people are offended that they might not be as "enlightned" as they fancy themselves to be.
• jcims 5y ago
  I think downvotes should require a comment as well. It's too limbic without that.
  • dcminter 5y ago
    I don't. If there was a comment I'd be tempted to argue. I'd prefer if I couldn't see the karma of my own posts & account too. Feature request if mods are reading: checkbox to hide my karma from me.
• CharlesW 5y ago
  > If downvotes don't matter… They clearly do, to you. I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego, but if I were to downvote this it would be because you don't have a persuasive argument for why an upvotes-only feedback system (which can also be easily gamed) is any better than one which supports both.
  • peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > I understand that upvotes-only systems are more compatible with your ego, This is criticism, IMO it's stupid criticism that should deserve a downvote, but you still wasted time to write it and it's ok, according to OP view of things, you responded to his words with some ad hominem attack, it's pointless and dumb in my opinion, but you put in the effort to respond and presented your arguments. Compare it to the blind downvoting, you get downvoted, with no reasoning, not knowing who did it and if you get 4 of them your comment gets hidden. Just 4. I much prefer your ad hominems to hypotetical perfectly valid downvotes. At least now people can form an opinion on what you wrote. With downvotes people just assume that the comment was worthless or worse. What if you had to reply to the comment before being able to downvote it? It would at least be a bit less anonymous.
• merpnderp 5y ago
  A while back I posted that according to my local state utility, installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price of installed nat-gas per year, both for the newest installations. And from that I concluded nuclear power was the only viable alternative to CO2 producing energy. Now this is the highest heresy in our new world religion, yet I only lost a single vote. Granted I didn't get any useful feedback on why I was wrong, likely because that would have involved 2 minutes of googling and some basic math, and it's just easier to believe what you want and click downvote. But Hacker News is still way better than anyplace else for serious discussions.
  • dane-pgp 5y ago
    > installed wind power cost per year was 4 times the latest price of installed nat-gas per year I don't know which state you are in, but for the US as a whole "recent [2018] wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant." https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-now-lower-than-the-cost-of-natural-gas/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/wind-power-prices-no...
    • merpnderp 5y ago
      But that's my point, none of these studies ever cite a utility's actual costs. When I got curious and looked at what the actual cost to the utility (not counting any federal rebates) just their actual outlays, versus how much power was generated over the year, it was ridiculous. And the easy way to know this is true is that utilities are still building nat-gas plants. It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits. If wind was actually cheaper than fuel, they'd just be over building wind farms so that no new nat-gas plants were needed.
      • dane-pgp 5y ago
        > just their actual outlays My instinct is that you're not including the cost of the fuel, or maybe the two types of plants have different financing models that are hard to compare directly, but I wouldn't be qualified to check your results even if you presented all the data. > It's not like they love nat-gas, they love money and profits. Doesn't this logic cut both ways? If wind energy was so expensive, then no one would be building wind farms.
• loopz 5y ago
  It's a good feedback system. Just because I and you don't get it, doesn't mean someone was indifferent to the post. It's meant to filter out discussions that are uninteresting. Just got to deal with if one isn't that interesting. Adding posts on top of that would be counterproductive. I often raise somewhat controversial opinion and topics. Very rarely do I see clusters of downvotes, and I'm not surprised people are against my own ideas. Otherwise they would be common! It also mirrors society outside academia. It happens that later upvotes changes the score significantly. Such is it with all change. Without some skin in the game, it's all spam and trolling otherwise. What might look strange in a mod system, might under analysis turn out to be well designed. For all forums there is an adaption phase, before getting what people expect from posts.
• yKnoTho 5y ago
  The world is binary, there are just a lot more binary decisions than we often tote around. It’s a great model for academic and scientific work but not for society. Thank the powers that be who push statistical analysis as being the “one path” to truth. The mathematicians who first defined our statistical tools warned about using them to run society, as they are all designed with a certain amount of loss of precision. When it comes to running a society, applying statistical models to people means rounding people off to make a choice work. Human biology works on adapting agency to the most common inputs; currently we are fine with man made behavior of treating each other like rounding errors. This meme we can just statistically carve up wealth held by a minority is a huge joke of a cultural effort; as you can see here you are berating the efforts of one of the minority we protect as being pathological. For starters, what real obligation is there scientifically to believe that Zuckerberg is that wealthy? Oh that’s right; their experts who built their systems that train our biology to stay addicted to them, using scientific theory of biology to manufacture consent.
• frankish 5y ago
  This pretty much sums up my sentiment as well. I think people should comment their disagreement instead of downvote. Others can then upvote the response, but at least dialogue can remain open. I've actually considered using a screenname like commentdontdownvote lol.
• zzzeek 5y ago
  downvotes matter a lot and you should not ignore them. they are trying to tell you something. you dont have to agree with that message, as I frequently post things on HN that get downvoted, usually not that surprisingly, and I continue to simply disagree with the majority HN community on certain topics. downvotes are usually accompanied by a few real responses that will add context to why these downvotes might be coming in. If we're going to have "upvotes" that can amplify things to a ridiculous degree, like all the vaccine mis-information on facebook that's being spread by something like eight individuals to hundreds of millions of people, then we need downvotes too. it's of course bad for facebook's business model.
  • kwhitefoot 5y ago
    If you want to tell me something you need to spell it out, not leave me guessing and wondering whether I have said something untrue or that you merely dislike it.
• enriquto 5y ago
  > But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them You don't understand. The dim messages are a nerd badge of honor here! Some of my proudest HN messages are those that finished at -4.
  • kome 5y ago
    I like the spirit :)
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  > I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. Tangential but whenever I read something like this, and people do post them a lot, I tend to assume they're actually normal, sensitive people who have learned that not showing any sign of harm means they're not experiencing any harm. Nothing you can say can hurt me == I have an unhealthy habit of suppressing my negative emotions
  • crazy_horse 5y ago
    Hey, wanted to respond to your comment because mine could come off as unhealthy. I simply mean that I'm old enough, have experienced enough that there are very few people in the world that can say something which I haven't already been told or I haven't imagined myself. Some rando on the net can't possibly hurt. But yeah, I don't mean to suggest suppressing your feelings.
    • spywaregorilla 5y ago
      Respectfully I don't really agree that this is a thing. There is an element of discerning that a person is just a jerk, misguided, dumb, or just shitposting without consequence due to anonymity or whatever and learning to disregard their opinions as irrelevant. That is, a lot of internet randos fall into this category. But I also think if people don't trigger a warning as someone worth shunning that their criticism affects us, especially irl.
    • fidesomnes 5y ago
      > I've been in academia for awhile, I'm used to getting serious criticism. I'm a man, my whole life I've been told to toughen up. There's really almost nothing you can say to me that is going to hurt me. I really mean it. All a student has to do is call you racist or touch one and you are fired. Have a nice day "manning up" to that one!
  • talentedcoin 5y ago
    Experiencing a negative emotion is not always, or even most of the time, the same thing as being hurt.
• okareaman 5y ago
  I don't mind downvotes on my comments, I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind of reason for it. Even a short comment "I don't like this" would be telling because it would indicate they don't have a reason other than emotion. Often I initially get a bunch of downvotes and then later enough upvotes to even it out.
  • tjpnz 5y ago
    >I just wish a downvote required a comment stating some kind of reason for it. Could be interesting if it were applied selectively. If a user had a higher number of downvotes to upvotes over a sustained period of time for instance.
    • okareaman 5y ago
      Someone with honest contrarian views would not be hurt by this because they leave usually comments with reasons. I appreciate them as much as the up voters.
  • Y_Y 5y ago
    I downvote stuff because it's either low-effort or inflammatory. I don't know if it would be valuable to tell the commenter this, because they're unlikely to agree. (I know that this isn't what everyone does, just wanted to offer a data point.)
• OrvalWintermute 5y ago
  Agree completely. While in theory I completely agree downvotes should be around, in practice I have seen they are an ideological voting machine used to suppress opinions. It is kind of unusual how fast the downvotes appear, as if there are downvote bots running on the HN & Reddit. I've posted a comment and had what appeared to be 3 downvotes within a minute. Of course, I am an evidence driven technologist that is not very partisan so that could explain some of it.
  • detaro 5y ago
    I always find the assumption that quick reactions are "bots" a bit weird. If I click on an active discussion, some comments will be "0 minutes" old (like yours right now, although it won't be when I submit this comment, because typing takes time - but downvoting doesn't). If I click on "comments" tab on HN, all comments there are new. So it's not particularly surprising that many people see your comment very shortly after it is posted on an active site like HN and react to it immediately.
    • bserge 5y ago
      They're not bots. Bots act on logic, however simple it is. These are mostly people who disengaged their brain.
      • detaro 5y ago
        How do you figure that? Plenty cases where "would I downvote that" is not something you need to think a lot about, so "quick" != "disengaged brain".
        • bserge 5y ago
          Long history participating in and analyzing discussions on Reddit.
  • bserge 5y ago
    If a comment that requires at least some thinking does not have a simple TLDR, preferably as the first line, you're going to get downvotes on Reddit and Imgur. People just aren't there to think and they have this "weapon" that they can use to shoo away anything they don't immediately understand. It's even more ridiculous that simple one sentence or better yet, one meme comments get drives of upvotes. You can easily automate that. Just copy and paste comments in the same thread, mix with some meme comments, and you're halfway to an account with high karma. Begs the question, why bother participating in this bottom of the barrel mindwankery? Nothing but an addiction these days. I say Reddit, but that platform is really a lot of smaller forums with useful information, even if you have to wade through some shit. Imgur on the other hand, I finally couldn't stand the sheer idiocy and quit. It's amazing, and I wish I could quit this site and Reddit, too.
• dahart 5y ago
  It sounds like you have a lot more fear and assumption than experience here. In reality, crazy unfair downvote bombing is not even close to the norm here in my ~decade of experience. What makes you certain that someone with multiple accounts has downvoted you? Are you sure you weren’t just wrong and didn’t know it? I’ve been wrong in good faith and gotten fairly downvoted for it far, far more often than I’ve been unfairly downvoted to death for something innocuous or positive and helpful. I have been unfairly downvoted before, but it’s just not a common occurrence. The most common way things go down are that a positive comment gets a few upvotes, once in a while gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes, and once every blue moon gets as many as 3 downvotes. On balance, positive comments have been an extremely high ratio of ups to downs. > Why would I participate in that? This is a good question, but you’ve constructed a straw man version of HN where everyone is against you. I think if you come at it with less fear and more curiosity, you will have a much better experience. Maybe spend more time reading without commenting and go out of your way to take special note of the positive interactions. The reasons I participate here are for the technical articles, for the wide variety of good advice on how to start and run a business, for the threads where world experts and relatively famous people participate and comment, for threads about things I love like GPUs and computer graphics, for retro computer history, and sometimes for adding comments where I hope to help people see the glass half full side of things. Good luck friend!
  • OrvalWintermute 5y ago
    I think the downvote brigading is getting more frequent. Just look at the recent threads where a submission was flagged and you will see a ton of them. Unfortunately, HN isn't showing the data behind quantities but due to the oscillations we see, there are definitely significant amounts of downvoting occuring.
    • Tenoke 5y ago
      Submission flagging is the main place it happens and I personally wish HN will not treat flagging as downvotes, or would just call it downvotes, or would have some sort of penalty for obvious cases of mis-flagging.
• TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  Given that many of his public posts are devoted to ranting against conformity of thought, it's amusing that pg designed a forum that rewards exactly that behavior.
  • epistasis 5y ago
    I don't think I agree at all. Some of my favorite comments I've made here are the ones that get downvoted. They point me to places where one of several interesting scenarios has occurred, such as, but not limited to: 1) I'm right, other people have not yet realized it and the way I'm expressing it doesn't make it clear that there's a good argument there. This is a fantastic opportunity. 2) I'm wrong about something, and haven't yet realized how. This is extremely valuable information because my own cognitive biases mean that it's difficult for me to discover through introspection. 3) lots of other possibilities too! When I stumble upon making a comment that gets unexpected downvotes, I have come across some of the most valuable information HN can give me. If I make a comment that I know will get lots of downvotes, I'm just wasting everybody's time. If I share something interesting that I think will get lots of upvotes, I may give some good information to others, but otherwise I'm mostly validating myself, which isn't a great use of my time. But most of the time I'm not commenting with any thoughts to votes, it's just about discussion. The votes just serves as a standin for body language that we'd get if we were talking face to face.
• Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  On HN in particular, I don't know how downvotes could be made any less psychologically impactful, short of completely hiding comment scores on even your own posts. Comments you posted never change color while you're logged in, so all you ever see is a little number, and the minimum score of -4 prevents massive pile-on situations. I basically see HN voting as a sort of crowdsourced curation mechanism. I upvote comments that I think should appear closer to the top, and I downvote comments which I think should appear further down, or which should fade out and become easier to skip over. And that's a large part of what makes HN comment threads interesting to read.
• Karellen 5y ago
  > If downvotes don't matter Votes don't matter. Upvotes, downvotes, they're just fake internet points, they don't mean anything. Don't sweat it. Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle. Downvotes are of even less consquence. Write good posts/comments. Be kind. Be useful. If the stuff you write gets downvoted, that's just the way it works out sometimes. Even if it gets downvoted into total oblivion, that doesn't mean that no-one read it or was helped by it. You might still have made a worthwhile contribution to someone's day. Let it go, and keep writing kind and useful things.
  • mindcrime 5y ago
    Some of my most upvoted posts/comments in various fora over the web have been quick low-effort in-joke references, or throwaway gags, whereas my carefully nuanced and referenced technical explanations have got a handful of upvotes. They're totally arbitrary, and the crowd is fickle. This is one of the more frustrating parts of the whole thing. I try not to care much about votes, but when a "throwaway comment" gets 50+ upvotes, while a carefully thought out, heavily researched, link/citation supported post with a lot of "meat" to it gets no votes at all, or even a downvote... that's just kind of grating in some sense. Well, it is to me anyway.
    • avel 5y ago
      But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you? Again -- votes don't matter. I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain. Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? Why don't upvotes bother you? Something to think about :)
      • mindcrime 5y ago
        Again -- votes don't matter. I absolutely love the parent post for making it so plain. The parent post made an assertion, but did not really justify that assertion. Sure, it's easy to say that in some abstract sense "down votes don't matter". I believe that myself, in that sort of abstract / hand-wavy sense. But real life experience shows us that down votes do matter to people - at least some people, some times, in some situations. Why? I'm not a psychologist, so I'm not going to pretend to understand the deeper aspects of that. But it seems self evident to me that it's related to the other evolved responses we humans have, related to peer approval, social status, recognition, embarrassment, etc. But _why_ does it feel kind of grating? Why does it frustate you? In the specific case I mentioned, I think it's largely about the mismatch between expectations and perceived subjective sense of "right/wrong" and reality. I expect random throwaway comments that just say "taxation is theft" to get downvoted. But when I spend 30 minutes doing research, looking up citations, and crafting a carefully composed response to something, to try to make a point or provide a useful reference to help somebody and then that gets down voted, it triggers that instinctive "unfairness reaction" that we have. Or that's my approximate theory anyway. Moreover, why do you only care about the downvotes? I think because a downvote is a form of disapproval, and it's done in public, and it correlates to our desire to avoid being shamed / embarrassed, especially in front of others.
• ttctciyf 5y ago
  > I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, As someone who's been in academia for a while, you should be amenable to the idea that unless you have actual evidence as to the single quadruply-accounted person and their ideological motivation, your statement of the case here is with considerably more certainty than is really warranted. Speaking in general, I've noticed that people are very willing to assume they have intimate knowledge of the circumstance under which their comment / post / etc. got one bit's worth of negative feedback when in fact they have very little to justify their assumptions. Some time ago, I came to the conclusion this is really a variety of projection, but you could simply see it as symptomatic of the very human tendency to fill gaps in knowledge with imagination in accordance with pre-existing bias. Unless we communicate perfectly in the difficult medium of online text-based discussion, it's best (IMO) to allow for the possibility that the particular form we chose to state our views or conduct a debate is deficient in a way we hadn't perceived, take the negative feedback, and look for ways to improve it, rather than impulsively reject the feedback by making hasty assumptions about why it occurred.
• city41 5y ago
  My main issue with downvotes is they are almost always used incorrectly. Including here at HN. They are not meant to be an "agree/disagree" button, but rather a way to filter out content that is not relevant to the discussion at hand. Disagreeing does not mean it is irrelevant, especially if it is well written and in good faith. We should allow all viewpoints that are put forward with proper intentions. Upvotes are even trickier, almost always people use them as a way to say they agree and people don't react negatively to that. But really they should be "this is well written, and adds good discourse, more people should see it", regardless of if you agree with it or not.
  • crb3 5y ago
    Maybe what's needed is explicit Agree and Disagree buttons, with indicators, to skim off such pollution of up/downvotes-as-QC?
    • kbelder 5y ago
      That would be an interesting experiment. Make it a 2D axis... Agree <--> Disagree, and Low Quality <--> High Quality. Only allow voting on one of the options.
      • Popegaf 5y ago
        There are some opensource, reddit alternatives that might be willing to implement this. https://lemmy.ml/ https://lemmy.ml/ comes to mind. You could suggest it there and it might fall upon open ears.
      • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        I would suggest you email that idea to dang. I'd like to see it tried here.
      • aqsalose 5y ago
        ... left and right vote in addition to up and downvote? Do not specify any rules nor instructions about when to vote left and when to vote right, but too much votes in either direction and the comment starts getting hidden. If you disagree with the trend where any particular comment is going, figure out the horizontal direction you should click by yourself. edit. I think there is no need for up/downvotes after this system is implemented. Some secret amount of horizontal votes in either direction is good (counted as upvote). Too much over the limit and the extra is counted as a downvote. Hide the score from voters. Ban comments that attempt to discuss the score of any comment. Now everyone has a reason to be a bit more careful when voting (...except when a comment is obviously too left or right).
• fidesomnes 5y ago
  > but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological, it's fucking stupid welcome to HN, enjoy your stay!
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  I upvoted you for this.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• ttGpN5Nde3pK 5y ago
  I can see this. One half-cocked idea I can think of is downvotes require a comment explaining why. Conversationally, "I agree" or "that's correct" requires no follow on conversation. However, "I disagree" or "that's wrong" requires some sort of counter-argument or reason why you disagree. IMO, it does some good in making people explain their position, at least copy/paste another position, or shitpost and then they can deal with their own downvotes.
• dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  I whole heartedly disagree. Votes are just a way for people say agree/disagree or like/dislike without filling up the thread with a whole bunch of noise. It alleviates some of the pressure that could cause flame wars, and minimizes all the back and forth comments that boil down to "Nuh Uhhh!" and "Yuh Huhhh!"[1] Also, without down votes the first few comments would have an even bigger advantage than they do now. [1] just like this comment I am leaving, which probably would have been better with just a down vote.
  • karaterobot 5y ago
    Downvoting to disagree is my knee-jerk reaction, too. But in most cases it's not as helpful as leaving a comment. Any time I leave a comment, there is usually at least some thought and effort behind it, and a downvote without explanation doesn't teach me anything, or persuade me to change my mind. If I don't know the reason for the downvote, my frequent assumption is "this person has poor reading comprehension, or isn't very bright, and just didn't understand what I'm saying. People often dislike things they don't understand. I guess it's true what they say: judge a man by the people who disagree with him." That's completely unfounded, sure, but lacking any additional information, it's as valid as any other conclusion about why I got downvoted. Maybe I've made some obvious error, but how would I know? In general, getting downvoted tends to make me less respectful of other people on HN, and more confident in my own (flawed) reasoning, compared to getting a thoughtful disagreement.
• underseacables 5y ago
  It sounds like this is more about your ego. Not to be glib, but if you have written out a thoughtful statement, who cares if it gets downvoted? You can’t control how other people are going to react, and getting upset that you lack that control, takes away from your arguments and makes it about you. How do you respond when colleagues or students disagree? Perhaps working in academia so long has given you a false sense of superiority.
  • howaboutnope 5y ago
    A downvote is not "disagreeing". It doesn't require the downvoter to be able to justify their action, they can just do it, and it is closer to violence than to communication.
    • krapp 5y ago
      Come and see the violence inherent to the system!
• re-al 5y ago
  Shh! You realise downvotes are a big deal for managing information on certain sites that we frequent...
• nickthemagicman 5y ago
  Down votes create cultural echo chambers and social cooling. What down votes should be for is rudeness or site violations...but they're effectively used to blackball people with counter opinions. There's a social cooling that goes along with anyone who has a counter opinion to the tribes narrative but doesn't want to be digitally outcast. And eventually those with differing opinions who do speak up accumulate enough down votes and are outcast. And over time the echo chamber continues to grow.... Edit: god bless HN echo chamber and the down votes.
  • shadowgovt 5y ago
    I suspect the original author would agree with your assessment on effects, but doesn't see either cultural echo chambers or social cooling as de-facto negatives. Lacking a downvote signal (i.e. a "most people who saw this disagreed" signal), a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers of equal apparent strength or value, increasingly divided by who upvotes what with no downvote counter-signal to breed some kind of consensus. I don't think it's assumable that either the inability to converge in a shared space or the alternative to social cooling (shout louder to be bigger, because there's no way to signal the other ideas should be smaller) are a net positive for the global online community (the latter, of course, does drive those engagement numbers up though...).
    • nickthemagicman 5y ago
      > a shared echo chamber is replaced with multiple echo chambers So you mean a variety of opinions?
      • shadowgovt 5y ago
        A variety of strongly-held opinions that are not proved against each other and don't intersect to build a coherent narrative.
        • nickthemagicman 5y ago
          I would much rather have a variety of perspectives than a coherent narrative. You learn more that way.
• wutbrodo 5y ago
  > But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it) /snip > It's not that I can't take being told I'm wrong, I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power. I don't understand. Why not just ignore them? I mean this pragmatically. "If they don't matter, they shouldn't exist" may be true. But if you're able to get over the emotional impact, it has little to no bearing on the value one can get out of participation in a forum. They don't actually have _that_ much power: this isn't the frontpage of Reddit,so the volume of comments is low enough that downvoted comments get plenty of exposure. I make no secret of my complaints about much of HN's culture. This isn't 2009: there are a lot of really stupid people on here now, so having a comment be downvoted[1] doesn't particularly bother me. I still engage because of the relative density of insightful and intellectually honest commenters. Once I lost respect for the commenter body in general, downvotes just started feeling like weather: semi-random and not worth complaining or even thinking much about. Now if you're saying that you can't handle the emotional impact of downvotes per se, try as you might to stop caring about them, that's fine. But be honest about it instead of couching it in four paragraphs of "I don't actually care but". [1] I'm not referring to the cases where I objectively deserve it because I was in retrospect being an ass. Those are part of the functioning of a healthy forum and I'm obviously fine with them
• foobarbecue 5y ago
  @crazy_horse, what do you have in mind when you say "we can do much better than downvotes"? In my opinion, stackoverflow-style downvotes are a good solution. Downvotes cost reputation points to cast, and can only be cast once you are at a certain trust level. SO has other issues, but I think they got downvoting right.
• rektide 5y ago
  Personally I think you're taking things too seriously, even though you're right. I enjoyed "The Great Online Game"[1] recently (1 comment), which stages this engagement as play. Although I would like to see my karma go up faster, that's not the point of the play for me. Unfortunately a lot of ludicrous, non-contributing, downvoting schmoes are part of the game. It's ok, it's still- for me- for fun, and I don't feel the need to adjust myself or my strategy of play because of the directed, biased negativity about. To me, the missing part of the equation is that down-voters don't have any stake in their downvotes (in many systems: Reddit, HN). De-anonymizing these behaviors, is, to me, how we begin to form an awareness of each other, is how we ought to stake ourselves in when we go about saying something is not valueable. We should be able to orient ourselves better online, understand each other, and build our own defensive & observatory systems. The web should be rich in information, & growingly interlinked, and from this we ought to be able to emerge, slowly, over decades, interesting webs of trust, and identifying the negative forces, the downvoters, is a key piece of understanding this web ought be able to encompass. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27955488
• Workaccount2 5y ago
  I don't think downvotes are the problem. I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms. The people who would normally upvote your honest good faith against the grain take are no longer on the platform, because the reigning ideology pushed them out. That doesn't mean you are necessarily ideologically aligned with these people, reality is much more nuanced then black and white.
  • asteroidbelt 5y ago
    > I don't think downvotes are the problem. > I think the problem largely comes from the echo-chamberization of platforms Echo-chamberization is a result of downvoting. When comments close to the borders of Overton window are downvotes, Overtone windows narrows over time.
• adventured 5y ago
  > But downvotes? I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them (and the culture associated with it). I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got because I'm not sufficiently ideological I've got a tip for that, that HN has rather amusingly trained me at doing. Comment and walk away. By doing that, you get to engage/participate, throw your opinion into the ring, and not care whether you're maliciously downvoted or not (you have no idea either way). Works on most any forum, including Reddit. Often on HN you'll get a wave of votes one direction or another, and it'll even out over time. The downvotes usually come on first by people that respond primarily by emotion determining their insta downvote behavior. That later gets offset by upvotes. If you pay attention to the early voting pattern, that process might be discouraging. My account is throttled and has been for many years. Even though I almost never use vulgar language, I'm one of the highest point accounts in HN history, and I go out of my way to avoid using personally directed language (ie always attempt to focus on the subject/topic/idea, not the person you're replying to), apparently I'm too aggressive for the mod liking here. That means I can't engage in multiple levels of discussion within a thread. So by necessity I learned to just comment and walk away; I only occasionally read replies and rarely notice up or down votes, because none of that matters as I can't engage over numerous replies regardless. It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try.
  • Y_Y 5y ago
    Maybe you can't respond to this, but I'd like to know if that's not less satisfying. I don't get much pleasure from just having my day ("shouting into the void") what I'm really here for is engagement, and the high-quality responses I get (or sometimes just acknowledgement). Without feedback there's nothing in it for me.
  • hutzlibu 5y ago
    " It's a wonderful freedom, to not care whether you get upvoted or downvoted. Give it a try. " I agree to that. But do not agree to just leave comment and leave approach in general. Then it is not a discussion anymore. You will never experience if there are any counterpoints to your opinion/facts, if you do not read replies to your opinions/facts. But if you experienced you get too emotional ... so aybe better this approach, than the furiated insulting one I guess.
• Causality1 5y ago
  There's definitely a downvote squad. I've noticed my comments tend to do much better their first few hours and downvotes tend to come later after the submission has fallen off the front page.
• LinuxBender 5y ago
  As an academic experiment, one could post a message here on HN and on Usenet to see how the interaction plays out on each platform. On Usenet, people can not vote or moderate your message. Messages are only removed from Usenet relays if they violate law for the most part. Anyone can reply if interested in doing so, with any text or content. Has anyone done this experiment recently?
  • denton-scratch 5y ago
    On Usenet, you can moderate your own incoming messages. Assuming you have a suitable newsreader (I know of none that are not suitable for use with killfiles).
    • LinuxBender 5y ago
      Opt-In self moderation is great. You can even do that here on HN with add-ons like uBlock. From My Filters ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political) ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr ycombinator.com##.itemlist > tbody > tr.athing:has-text(political)+tr+tr More examples [0] and there are a few other incantations of this. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22781635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22781635
      • underseacables 5y ago
        Filters would be fantastic. I would love very much to be able to filter out specific words and phrases from my HN view.
        • LinuxBender 5y ago
          A simpler add-on for words and phrases is FoxReplace. [1] [1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/
• acituan 5y ago
  > I've got no problem being wrong, but when I spend a significant amount of time trying to respond to something in good faith and then someone comes along with their four accounts and downvotes every comment I got It doesn't even need to be 4 accounts. Just a single lazy downvote can be infuriating due to the asymmetry in effort and influence. The root cause is downvotes having been made into a combination of multiple things; yes it is a shortcut for expressing disagreement, but it is also a metric used for decreasing the salience of a point (e.g. in HN). Imagine how much of history of science, religion, philosophy would be lost if disagreeability of a point alone was a good heuristic for its attention-worthiness. Additionally, since downvotes are an expression of disagreement, they are just opinions that have privileged representations in the UI, but they can't be disagreed with like other opinions. It does not build dialectic, it kills it by not allowing responses. Ultimately we are trying to dynamically build a model of at least attention and content value based on collective intelligence that can articulate on 2 dimensions. My humble proposal would be double the size of dimensions; have up-down votes for dis-agreement, which require justification, which can be responded to, and back-fore votes for salience dynamics, i.e. foreground if "I think more people should read this" and background if "I think people shouldn't waste time on this idea".
• bigbillheck 5y ago
  > I just don't want to be involved in a community where supposed professionals act like that; frankly is scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power. That's a fine opinion to have, but why are you then in academia?
• ricardobeat 5y ago
  > it scares me that such malicious and petty people might have power How do we get from "I am being downvoted" to "malicious and petty people"? That looks like an issue. You said you have no problem being wrong, twice, but immediately assume anyone who downvotes your comment is malicious, when it could be a signal that your comment is just not hitting the right notes.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > I pretty much won't post on HN or Reddit because of them I agree with everything you wrote except for the part about actually not participating - try as I might (and knowing better), I just can't keep myself away. I've taken long hiatuses, but I'm always inexorably drawn back anyway.
• popcorncentury 5y ago
  Exactly. The article reads like expressing displeasure is hampered. But if negative comments have increased, then that is a good thing, because at least the commenters have had to come out of the woodwork to express themselves. And then we can talk, if they actually have a point. Or we can upvote your point. Downvotes are anonymous slaps on the wrist with no recourse. They're insulting, offensive, and then further used for censorship (especially here). People who don't know what they're talking about, can't articulate themselves, or are just taking sides all get to punish what they don't like without being caught. They get to be taken seriously. By robots. The author of the article is a prolific writer. If anyone knows the importance of writing, even long-form writing, it would be him, and it's exactly what he used to make his point about downvotes. He could not have done it with a downvote, or even a tweet. Nuance is invaluable and context is king. Language gives us all of it. Twitter makes us stupid. Votes make us children. When expression is limited, the dumber - and more violent - we become.
• wchar_t 5y ago
  There are a few interesting "alternatives" to the standard downvotes we see. For example: * "Flavored" downvotes that come with a reason attached (e.g., "troll", "incorrect", "unkind", "spam", "disagree"). Seen on e.g., Lobsters. * Multiple downvotes/upvotes (up to +5 upvotes, up to -3 downvotes). I forget where I saw this, probably Slashdot(?) or some random forum... I wish more sites would experiment with these ideas. I feel like the first idea, flavored downvotes, would somewhat alleviate the issue you're describing (i.e., a puddle of downvotes that leaves you wondering what was wrong with your comment). Of course brigading wouldn't be solved by that though.
• ohreallynow 5y ago
  I'm surprised dang isn't on this like flies on shit because usually when we discuss downvoting brigade he links us to the guidelines and hem-haw's around how we shouldn't be bringing it up. I've seen The_Donald be handled with more decorum than this place - and I've been here for over a decade.
  • smolder 5y ago
    This discussion seems to be more about downvoting in general and across multiple sites, rather than specific accusations of certain groups downvote-brigading on HN, which dang usually responds to.
• Layke1123 5y ago
  Or maybe, you are just wrong and can't actually take it. Being professional doesn't mean people have to take your opinions seriously.
• throwaway675309 5y ago
  I use a throwaway account and a really simple tamper monkey script that hides my current feedback score, this allows me to interact on this website without getting neurotically obsessed with how other people think of me. It allows me to push back on polarizing posts without having to get too psychologically involved.
• Florin_Andrei 5y ago
  The problem with "democratic" downvotes is that the vote of an expert is equal with the vote of an ignorant who votes while browsing the internets in the evening while drunk. Actually, that's kind of the problem with democracy in general.
• woxko 5y ago
  Getting downvoted to me is an honour because most people on the internet are dunces. If you get downvoted you know you struck a nerve or at least the other person wasted a few seconds of his life reading your retarded opinion. Happiness is in the little things.
• anigbrowl 5y ago
  I partly disagree with your comment (HN isn't an academy) but you make a good point that 4 downvotes are enough to effectively make a comment disappear. That can be abused to easily wreck good comments, adn genuinely shitty comments don't get enough negative feedback. When you add in flagging and other factors, the 'mysterious black box + benevolent moderator' approach satisfies nobody and is easily gamed by bad actors. It's just an attempt at community security through obscurity, and like all STO approaches it doesn't work. There's also evidence to suggest that flamewars do a better job of eliminating toxicity over the long term than the approach outlined above.
• redis_mlc 5y ago
  Once you understand that most HN downvotes are from Marxists, it doesn't bother you. It just confirms that you're right.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  HN has a bit of the opposite policy, but it would be interesting to only allow downvotes if you have responded to the comment. You would need a separate mechanism for flagging though to filter low effort contributions and it is questionable if that wouldn't just replace downvotes with flagging. Alternatively maybe only have that rule for comments above a certain length, although that isn't a good metric either.