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On a side note - does HN feel more "downvotey" lately? I feel like I'm seeing more comments that are grayed out but seem perfectly civil and reasonable. Often

by alex_c 5y ago

On a side note - does HN feel more "downvotey" lately? I feel like I'm seeing more comments that are grayed out but seem perfectly civil and reasonable. Often they're back in the black soon after, but I'm sure the time period when they're greyed out influences the discussion. Of course, I don't have any way to measure this. I wonder if some of the thresholds need to be tweaked.

ativzzz 5y ago
I think this is just because HN is getting bigger, and people downvote comments that don't necessarily warrant downvotes, and one or two downvotes will probably attract more people to read a comment and disagree with the downvote.
chansiky 5y ago
My opinion is downvotes should require a reason for downvote. Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation. Getting in the weeds here, but then if others agree with the downvote rationale, they can upvote the downvote which can be used as some metric. This already happens on HN and reddit - people downvote all the time then provide a reason, but not all people provide a reason for their disagreement, allowing for useless downvotes that dont help the community in any way - for example an "ad hominem" downvote. What this means is that disagreeing opinions are allowed attacks without any risk of retaliation, and in what game is that ever fair?
- ddingus 5y ago
  The downside of that is increased meta. And the reason is simple: They did not agree and or lack shared perspective before the down vote and that being true after the downvote starts another disagreeable discussion. It all gets worse when people know who downvoted them...
  - chansiky 5y ago
    Only the initial downvoting commenter would have to reveal his name. Then others can just bolster the downvote which harms the rating of the original comment, sort of like a "let him without sin be the first to throw the stone" situation. Then others can join in if they agree. And that might hurt if they're throwing stones at us but at least we get to see where the stones are coming from. Currently we dont, we just get stoned and dont know why.
    - ddingus 5y ago
      First, As soon as we introduce who, then we introduce meta about them. And doing that ends up a discussion that all of us will be impacted by. There aren't easy answers. Pretty much everything in this whole discussion has been done, impacts easy for anyone who wants to look to see. And I have. This is a topic of great interest to me. I have moderated in the past, and found it difficult and challenging. I've learned more here than anywhere else. ( I did three, now four, replies here, partially because I'm using voice dictation, and partially because there are three major, potential points of discussion.)
    - ddingus 5y ago
      Secondly, being told why doesn't help as much as you would think. That itself is another meta discussion. People won't take the why as given. They will want to argue it, challenge the qualifications of others, and you can go down the list. It all happens. People I see taking that feedback to contemplate is rare. The number one reason why people want to be told why so they can argue their case. And that's what's going to trigger The Meta. On Quora this problem happened and a bunch of us created a court where someone could appeal downvotes, and sort of argue their case. That discussion would involve feedback to the person who got downvoted, and if it all didn't warrant being downvoted, a whole bunch of people would up vote, basically correcting a wrong. It was a super interesting exercise in the genuine ambiguity text communication has. The fact is we really can't determine intent from text. People can, and we'll take things all sorts of interesting and crazy ways. And whether they are correct in doing that or not, the discussion to sort it out is laborious and time-consuming. Now I will tell you, a bunch of people working hard on this problem and sort out a disagreement or downvote that shouldn't have happened. And maybe a third of those were worthy exercises in that the person who initiated the process took away something that genuinely help them to improve. Another big percentage, were just fixing bad down votes. But it cost a lot to do that. The rest were fairly painful meta discussions. Unproductive. No the reason that all made some sense on Quora was the downvotes had Fairly severe consequences and fairly rapidly. Here, it's not such a big deal. Anyone who makes more good decisions about what they say and not will gain karma. That's all that's required. So rather than Stones, it's more like little Pebbles. Frankly, the easiest way to get past this here is to just not worry about it, and try to be a good human. In a lot of cases, people who get some downvotes here probably weren't trying their best to be good human. If they try harder they get less downvotes. Good As It Gets.
- iaml 5y ago
  Yeah, I agree it would be interesting. Very often I'd like to be able to reply to everyone who brigade-downvotes things on reddit when for example they don't have some context or something counterintuitive is actually true according to reputable source.
- spiffytech 5y ago
  Tildes.net tries something interesting here: there is no downvote, but users can flag comments with one of the provided negative attributes (offtopic, noise, malice)[0]. This discourages "downvote to disagree", and provides enough signal to e.g., sink an off-topic comment, but summon a moderator for malicious comments. [0] https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#la...
  - chansiky 5y ago
    Thanks for sharing, this is a really interesting thought and its very close to one I had based on this thread, with the one difference being that instead of letting others decide what kind of comment one makes, we should really lean into thinking of commenting as a sort of game and let the user decides what kind of comment they are making, by letting them choose to attack/defend/support a position. We've seen how the upvote/downvote w/ranking systems play, I'm not a big fan of what reddit has become lately, and I wonder where HN would be without great moderators. At the very least it would be refreshing to see how alternative mechanics lead to different communities. Sort of related is this thought, Wikipedia is an MMORPG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMOR...
- randomdata 5y ago
  > Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation. Agreement isn't useful feedback. An upvote implies that the comment is funny, a virtual laugh if you will, which is useful feedback to allow you to hone the entertainment value of your comments. I suspect the next person will have a different take, though. Which ultimately means that the votes mean nothing at all beyond that someone, assuming no bots are at play, pressed a button. Therefore, votes are just a poor man's analytics system. They give some vague feedback that someone was near your comment and nothing more. Which button was pressed makes no difference.
pmdulaney 5y ago
I have never downvoted anyone on HN; whatever miniscule benefit there may be to having a downvote feature is more than offset by the chilling effect and perceived nastiness. We are beginning to see that all these years we thought it was our constitutional right to free speech that was the major thing. Yes, it would be and will be if the government takes a turn for the worst, but really what we're seeing in the US is an erosion in the ethos of free speech, an attitude that in our society you are welcome to say something that I heartily disagree with.
- StevenRayOrr 5y ago
  > We are beginning to see that all these years we thought it was our constitutional right to free speech that was the major thing. Yes, it would be and will be if the government takes a turn for the worst, but really what we're seeing in the US is an erosion in the ethos of free speech, an attitude that in our society you are welcome to say something that I heartily disagree with. When did American society have an 'ethos' of free speech (let alone an ethos of universal free speech)?
  - pmdulaney 5y ago
    The '70's, '80's? Of course this is a matter of opinion, and yours is different from mine. Would you at least agree that there is less of a free speech ethos than there was 10 years ago? If not, it may just be an issue of whose ox is being gored, if you follow me.
- carapace 5y ago
  > an attitude that in our society you are welcome to say something that I heartily disagree with. That's not the ethos of free speech, the ethos is the recognition that we don't have the right to silence the other fellow. You've got to keep in mind the context of the formation of the country and the writing of the Constitution: we had just ditched the King, eh? (And by "we" I mean the wealthy land-owning (and in some cases slave-owning!) ex-Englishmen who were in the room at the time.) We decided that we didn't have the right to abridge the freedom of speech of each other. So it's not that we welcome speech we disagree with, (e.g. see the reception of Abolition or Women's Suffrage), it's that we mustn't use the force of law to silence those we disagree with. These days, with the rise of social media, people are communicating en mass with each other over systems that are privately owned and built in such a way that the owners feel the need to moderate and even censor some speech. That puts us in a weird situation, one that didn't tend to apply to ostensibly private communication (mail, phones). (But radio and TV and movies have always been moderated (George Carlin - "Seven Words You Can't Say On TV" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBH5oNQOS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBH5oNQOS0 ). Heck, comic books used to be moderated!)
newsbinator 5y ago
I’ve noticed this too. I’m nervous HN will turn into Reddit, where the downvote button is the same as an “I disagree” button or a “I don’t like the reality your comment explains” button.
- mholm 5y ago
  As somebody under whatever karma threshold (500?) is required for downvoting, that should serve as a decent protection. 500 is fairly significant to achieve, and will require learning how the community works, unless you have quite a few lucky/high effort posts.

by alex_c 5y ago

ativzzz 5y ago

I think this is just because HN is getting bigger, and people downvote comments that don't necessarily warrant downvotes, and one or two downvotes will probably attract more people to read a comment and disagree with the downvote.

chansiky 5y ago

My opinion is downvotes should require a reason for downvote. Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation. Getting in the weeds here, but then if others agree with the downvote rationale, they can upvote the downvote which can be used as some metric. This already happens on HN and reddit - people downvote all the time then provide a reason, but not all people provide a reason for their disagreement, allowing for useless downvotes that dont help the community in any way - for example an "ad hominem" downvote. What this means is that disagreeing opinions are allowed attacks without any risk of retaliation, and in what game is that ever fair?

ddingus 5y ago
The downside of that is increased meta. And the reason is simple: They did not agree and or lack shared perspective before the down vote and that being true after the downvote starts another disagreeable discussion. It all gets worse when people know who downvoted them...
- chansiky 5y ago
  Only the initial downvoting commenter would have to reveal his name. Then others can just bolster the downvote which harms the rating of the original comment, sort of like a "let him without sin be the first to throw the stone" situation. Then others can join in if they agree. And that might hurt if they're throwing stones at us but at least we get to see where the stones are coming from. Currently we dont, we just get stoned and dont know why.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    First, As soon as we introduce who, then we introduce meta about them. And doing that ends up a discussion that all of us will be impacted by. There aren't easy answers. Pretty much everything in this whole discussion has been done, impacts easy for anyone who wants to look to see. And I have. This is a topic of great interest to me. I have moderated in the past, and found it difficult and challenging. I've learned more here than anywhere else. ( I did three, now four, replies here, partially because I'm using voice dictation, and partially because there are three major, potential points of discussion.)
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Secondly, being told why doesn't help as much as you would think. That itself is another meta discussion. People won't take the why as given. They will want to argue it, challenge the qualifications of others, and you can go down the list. It all happens. People I see taking that feedback to contemplate is rare. The number one reason why people want to be told why so they can argue their case. And that's what's going to trigger The Meta. On Quora this problem happened and a bunch of us created a court where someone could appeal downvotes, and sort of argue their case. That discussion would involve feedback to the person who got downvoted, and if it all didn't warrant being downvoted, a whole bunch of people would up vote, basically correcting a wrong. It was a super interesting exercise in the genuine ambiguity text communication has. The fact is we really can't determine intent from text. People can, and we'll take things all sorts of interesting and crazy ways. And whether they are correct in doing that or not, the discussion to sort it out is laborious and time-consuming. Now I will tell you, a bunch of people working hard on this problem and sort out a disagreement or downvote that shouldn't have happened. And maybe a third of those were worthy exercises in that the person who initiated the process took away something that genuinely help them to improve. Another big percentage, were just fixing bad down votes. But it cost a lot to do that. The rest were fairly painful meta discussions. Unproductive. No the reason that all made some sense on Quora was the downvotes had Fairly severe consequences and fairly rapidly. Here, it's not such a big deal. Anyone who makes more good decisions about what they say and not will gain karma. That's all that's required. So rather than Stones, it's more like little Pebbles. Frankly, the easiest way to get past this here is to just not worry about it, and try to be a good human. In a lot of cases, people who get some downvotes here probably weren't trying their best to be good human. If they try harder they get less downvotes. Good As It Gets.
iaml 5y ago
Yeah, I agree it would be interesting. Very often I'd like to be able to reply to everyone who brigade-downvotes things on reddit when for example they don't have some context or something counterintuitive is actually true according to reputable source.
spiffytech 5y ago
Tildes.net tries something interesting here: there is no downvote, but users can flag comments with one of the provided negative attributes (offtopic, noise, malice)[0]. This discourages "downvote to disagree", and provides enough signal to e.g., sink an off-topic comment, but summon a moderator for malicious comments. [0] https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#la...
- chansiky 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing, this is a really interesting thought and its very close to one I had based on this thread, with the one difference being that instead of letting others decide what kind of comment one makes, we should really lean into thinking of commenting as a sort of game and let the user decides what kind of comment they are making, by letting them choose to attack/defend/support a position. We've seen how the upvote/downvote w/ranking systems play, I'm not a big fan of what reddit has become lately, and I wonder where HN would be without great moderators. At the very least it would be refreshing to see how alternative mechanics lead to different communities. Sort of related is this thought, Wikipedia is an MMORPG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMORPG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_an_MMOR...
randomdata 5y ago
> Upvotes imply aggreement of the original post therefore do not need further explanation. Agreement isn't useful feedback. An upvote implies that the comment is funny, a virtual laugh if you will, which is useful feedback to allow you to hone the entertainment value of your comments. I suspect the next person will have a different take, though. Which ultimately means that the votes mean nothing at all beyond that someone, assuming no bots are at play, pressed a button. Therefore, votes are just a poor man's analytics system. They give some vague feedback that someone was near your comment and nothing more. Which button was pressed makes no difference.

pmdulaney 5y ago

I have never downvoted anyone on HN; whatever miniscule benefit there may be to having a downvote feature is more than offset by the chilling effect and perceived nastiness. We are beginning to see that all these years we thought it was our constitutional right to free speech that was the major thing. Yes, it would be and will be if the government takes a turn for the worst, but really what we're seeing in the US is an erosion in the ethos of free speech, an attitude that in our society you are welcome to say something that I heartily disagree with.

StevenRayOrr 5y ago
> We are beginning to see that all these years we thought it was our constitutional right to free speech that was the major thing. Yes, it would be and will be if the government takes a turn for the worst, but really what we're seeing in the US is an erosion in the ethos of free speech, an attitude that in our society you are welcome to say something that I heartily disagree with. When did American society have an 'ethos' of free speech (let alone an ethos of universal free speech)?
- pmdulaney 5y ago
  The '70's, '80's? Of course this is a matter of opinion, and yours is different from mine. Would you at least agree that there is less of a free speech ethos than there was 10 years ago? If not, it may just be an issue of whose ox is being gored, if you follow me.
carapace 5y ago
> an attitude that in our society you are welcome to say something that I heartily disagree with. That's not the ethos of free speech, the ethos is the recognition that we don't have the right to silence the other fellow. You've got to keep in mind the context of the formation of the country and the writing of the Constitution: we had just ditched the King, eh? (And by "we" I mean the wealthy land-owning (and in some cases slave-owning!) ex-Englishmen who were in the room at the time.) We decided that we didn't have the right to abridge the freedom of speech of each other. So it's not that we welcome speech we disagree with, (e.g. see the reception of Abolition or Women's Suffrage), it's that we mustn't use the force of law to silence those we disagree with. These days, with the rise of social media, people are communicating en mass with each other over systems that are privately owned and built in such a way that the owners feel the need to moderate and even censor some speech. That puts us in a weird situation, one that didn't tend to apply to ostensibly private communication (mail, phones). (But radio and TV and movies have always been moderated (George Carlin - "Seven Words You Can't Say On TV" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBH5oNQOS0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBH5oNQOS0 ). Heck, comic books used to be moderated!)

newsbinator 5y ago

I’ve noticed this too. I’m nervous HN will turn into Reddit, where the downvote button is the same as an “I disagree” button or a “I don’t like the reality your comment explains” button.

mholm 5y ago
As somebody under whatever karma threshold (500?) is required for downvoting, that should serve as a decent protection. 500 is fairly significant to achieve, and will require learning how the community works, unless you have quite a few lucky/high effort posts.