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Hacker News has a similar problem with comments: net_votes = up_votes - down_votes You need at least two of the above variables to get an idea of both the d

Hacker News has a similar problem with comments: net_votes = up_votes - down_votes You need at least two of the above variables to get an idea of both the direction and magnitude of the voting. Hacker News provides only one: net_votes. YouTube used to provide up_votes and down_votes, effectively providing all three. Now YouTube has reduced its information to up_votes, so they're now down to one variable in the equation, as Hacker News has been all along. The difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site. I think it would be better for HN to go to where YouTube was, giving us an idea of both the net vote and the level of activity. Like up/down or up/total or net/total.

polote 5y ago
Because on HN there are only two possible states for comments. Flagged or visible. The upvotes and downvotes just help compute the order. This is better for freedom of expression and showing the split would be a bad idea imo. Comments who are more upvoted are also more downvoted because they are more visible (as they rank first)
- Eelongate 5y ago
  > Because on HN there are only two possible states for comments. Flagged or visible. The upvotes and downvotes just help compute the order. That's an oversimplification; downvotes may also reduce the visibility of comments by making them an eyebleeding gray-on-white.
jjcon 5y ago
I think that net votes is still far far better than just up votes. With net votes at least spam or misleading can at times be somewhat detectable.
r00fus 5y ago
It's very interesting to ask what's gained by seeing downvotes in addition to upvotes, and whether that differs based on whether the content is video or commentary. HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes. Especially since in most cases, you can simply comment instead of downvote.
- skissane 5y ago
  > HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes. Downvotes on HN comments aren't a pure quality signal. HN's culture is that downvoting something just because you disagree with it is perfectly cromulent behaviour, as established by PG himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691 Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of that decision, but I didn't start this site.
  - Strom 5y ago
    It might be cromulent to some, but in my experience it is not widespread. Definitely done at a much lower rate than other places like reddit. Main indicator of this is that on HN it's not uncommon to see an upvoted comment that has almost exclusively argumentative replies. However on reddit when I see a comment with so many disagreeing responses, it's well into the negative. Also, at a sample point of one, I make an effort to never downvote because of disagreement. I don't behave that way on reddit. Something about herd mentality perhaps.
    - skissane 5y ago
      > Main indicator of this is that on HN it's not uncommon to see an upvoted comment that has almost exclusively argumentative replies It could be that people who agree upvote without replying, people who disagree reply to argue against it. HN discourages non-substantive replies; if you agree with everything someone says, it can be hard to generate a substantive reply to it. (In practice, occasional non-substantive agreeing replies are tolerated, but people who do it more than occasionally often encounter some pushback.)
    - r00fus 5y ago
      Venue, setting and audience definitely matters. On HN I get downvoted for being too inflammatory and I learn & adjust my posting. Other sites (subreddits or political commentary sites) I might get upvoted for the same.
kzrdude 5y ago
Moderation here is quite opionated, isn't it? I would guess that it's a very conscious choice to not show votes or downvotes, since it makes commenter interaction even more contentious. I like it the way it is.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gthtjtkt 5y ago
  HN is the most heavily moderated, manipulated and astro-turned forum I've even seen, but you don't realize that until the mods start suppressing your posts and comments. Titles are constantly edited for no apparent reason, users who post unpopular facts are permanently penalized, and you can watch as negative stories about large tech companies are quickly flagged off the front page. There's literally zero transparency here. At least on Reddit you can track the censorship in real time.
  - ketzo 5y ago
    > you can watch as negative stories about large tech companies are quickly flagged off the front page. you’re literally writing this underneath a very popular, negative, front-page post about a big tech company.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gy4ey665t 5y ago
  Hacker News is the most heavily moderated, manipulated and astro-turned forum I've even seen, but you don't realize that until the mods start suppressing your posts and comments. Titles are constantly edited for no apparent reason, users who post unpopular facts are permanently penalized, and you can watch as negative stories about large tech companies are quickly flagged off the front page. There's zero transparency here. At least on sites like Reddit you can track the censorship in real time.
  - 5y ago
emerged 5y ago
It doesn’t provide either except on your own posts, right? Or is that some super karma unlock feature.
kazinator 5y ago
Hacker news has a minimum karma requirement for downvoting; you can't just create an account (or a dozen accounts) and start downvoting something you don't like, or to harass someone with serial downvotes. You must first attract a certain number of upvotes for your comments and submissions. That fixes many of the abuse problems with downvotes. HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who intervene. YT is too vastly big for that.
- busymom0 5y ago
  Am I wrong or does Stack Overflow deduct a point from your own karma if you downvote someone else?
  - smusamashah 5y ago
    They do subtract 1 point.
  - arpafaucon 5y ago
    Something a bit more complicated if I remember well. Something like: - You can down vote questions for free - but down voting answers costs you 1 karma (and encourages you to provide a proper answer instead)
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  > HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who intervene. YT is too vastly big for that. Agreed. Another way of framing this is that HN is sponsored by an organization that makes a lot more money per HN user than Google makes per YouTube user. In other words, HN users don’t have to pay for their own moderation by generating revenue in the same way YouTubes users do.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  > YT is too vastly big for that. No it's not, it's our society that's fucked. It's our CEOs' legal requirement of fiduciary responsibility that causes these problems. YouTube was 10.9% of Google's revenue for the year 2020, with something around $19,770,000,000 of income. How many employees could Google hire to manually investigate and take action against users? Even 10% of that income to address this problem would hire literally tens of thousands of people to tackle the issue. The "problem" with Big Tech is that they're convinced of their own intelligence and they all believe they can automate their way to Utopia. Well you can't. You're not that smart. You're not that wise. You need bodies on the ground, you need hands doing work. We may get there some day, but it won't be today, tomorrow, ten years from now, and it may not even be a hundred years from now. A little painful hubris in the form of some of these enormous social media platforms collapsing not under their own weight, but under their own arrogance in the form of thinking they can automate their problems away, would be a good dose of medicine sorely needed.
koofdoof 5y ago
Hacker News at least somewhat shows when a comment's net_votes is negative by fading the visibilty out. Which is kind of the exact opposite of YouTube's new system, showing only negative responses vs only positive responses.
- _____-___ 5y ago
  Yeah, HN shows the net_votes, YouTube is now only showing upvotes, so the person you're replying to is wrong here. It's not the same since HN's showing what people think of the comment, vs YouTube only showing people who liked the content. Not saying it couldn't be better, it's just a flawed comparison.
paulpauper 5y ago
The problem is voting is that it confirms what views are popular, not what is correct . The assumption that voting can help correct misinformation is probably wrong.
TheMonarchist 5y ago
> The difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site. I wonder whether using a ratio instead of difference would help?
- hnbad 5y ago
  The main difference is a +102/-100 post is "controversial" whereas a +2/-0 post is not. It's interesting to see both what the "net score" is and how "intense" it is. If by "ratio" you mean showing both the net score and the total number of votes, I guess that would be one way to solve this. But a single ratio score (i.e. net score divided by total number of votes) is probably just going to look weird and useless.
  - TheMonarchist 5y ago
    I was thinking of something like (upvotes+1) / (downvotes+1). Adding 1 to denominator is necessary to avoid division by 0. Adding it to numerator too balances it out and makes varying number of downvotes visible in spite of 0 upvotes. Controversial posts would get a score near 1 instead of fluctuating. You would also get a rough idea of intensity as more ratios become possible when the number of votes increases. I think it's still simple enough to be transparent to most users.
- bradbeattie 5y ago
  Didn't we just have a conversation about how not to average things? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200103 The same principle could be applied to upvotes/downvotes too, yeah?
justsomeuser 5y ago
I agree. I think the most valuable comments are the ones which have a balance of a large amount of "up" and "down" votes. Those are not just "upvote if you agree with this positive sentiment", but often giving valid reasons against someones opinion.
soheil 5y ago
Having a functionality and then removing it is very different than never having it in the first place.

polote 5y ago

Because on HN there are only two possible states for comments. Flagged or visible. The upvotes and downvotes just help compute the order. This is better for freedom of expression and showing the split would be a bad idea imo. Comments who are more upvoted are also more downvoted because they are more visible (as they rank first)

Eelongate 5y ago
> Because on HN there are only two possible states for comments. Flagged or visible. The upvotes and downvotes just help compute the order. That's an oversimplification; downvotes may also reduce the visibility of comments by making them an eyebleeding gray-on-white.

jjcon 5y ago

I think that net votes is still far far better than just up votes. With net votes at least spam or misleading can at times be somewhat detectable.

r00fus 5y ago

It's very interesting to ask what's gained by seeing downvotes in addition to upvotes, and whether that differs based on whether the content is video or commentary. HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes. Especially since in most cases, you can simply comment instead of downvote.

skissane 5y ago
> HN comments can still be downvoted (if you have enough karma) so arguably you can still get signal quality from the sum of votes. Downvotes on HN comments aren't a pure quality signal. HN's culture is that downvoting something just because you disagree with it is perfectly cromulent behaviour, as established by PG himself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=658691 Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of that decision, but I didn't start this site.
- Strom 5y ago
  It might be cromulent to some, but in my experience it is not widespread. Definitely done at a much lower rate than other places like reddit. Main indicator of this is that on HN it's not uncommon to see an upvoted comment that has almost exclusively argumentative replies. However on reddit when I see a comment with so many disagreeing responses, it's well into the negative. Also, at a sample point of one, I make an effort to never downvote because of disagreement. I don't behave that way on reddit. Something about herd mentality perhaps.
  - skissane 5y ago
    > Main indicator of this is that on HN it's not uncommon to see an upvoted comment that has almost exclusively argumentative replies It could be that people who agree upvote without replying, people who disagree reply to argue against it. HN discourages non-substantive replies; if you agree with everything someone says, it can be hard to generate a substantive reply to it. (In practice, occasional non-substantive agreeing replies are tolerated, but people who do it more than occasionally often encounter some pushback.)
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Venue, setting and audience definitely matters. On HN I get downvoted for being too inflammatory and I learn & adjust my posting. Other sites (subreddits or political commentary sites) I might get upvoted for the same.

kzrdude 5y ago

Moderation here is quite opionated, isn't it? I would guess that it's a very conscious choice to not show votes or downvotes, since it makes commenter interaction even more contentious. I like it the way it is.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gthtjtkt 5y ago
HN is the most heavily moderated, manipulated and astro-turned forum I've even seen, but you don't realize that until the mods start suppressing your posts and comments. Titles are constantly edited for no apparent reason, users who post unpopular facts are permanently penalized, and you can watch as negative stories about large tech companies are quickly flagged off the front page. There's literally zero transparency here. At least on Reddit you can track the censorship in real time.
- ketzo 5y ago
  > you can watch as negative stories about large tech companies are quickly flagged off the front page. you’re literally writing this underneath a very popular, negative, front-page post about a big tech company.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gy4ey665t 5y ago
Hacker News is the most heavily moderated, manipulated and astro-turned forum I've even seen, but you don't realize that until the mods start suppressing your posts and comments. Titles are constantly edited for no apparent reason, users who post unpopular facts are permanently penalized, and you can watch as negative stories about large tech companies are quickly flagged off the front page. There's zero transparency here. At least on sites like Reddit you can track the censorship in real time.
- 5y ago

emerged 5y ago

It doesn’t provide either except on your own posts, right? Or is that some super karma unlock feature.

kazinator 5y ago

Hacker news has a minimum karma requirement for downvoting; you can't just create an account (or a dozen accounts) and start downvoting something you don't like, or to harass someone with serial downvotes. You must first attract a certain number of upvotes for your comments and submissions. That fixes many of the abuse problems with downvotes. HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who intervene. YT is too vastly big for that.

busymom0 5y ago
Am I wrong or does Stack Overflow deduct a point from your own karma if you downvote someone else?
- smusamashah 5y ago
  They do subtract 1 point.
- arpafaucon 5y ago
  Something a bit more complicated if I remember well. Something like: - You can down vote questions for free - but down voting answers costs you 1 karma (and encourages you to provide a proper answer instead)
fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
> HN situations are also monitored by the site operators themselves, who intervene. YT is too vastly big for that. Agreed. Another way of framing this is that HN is sponsored by an organization that makes a lot more money per HN user than Google makes per YouTube user. In other words, HN users don’t have to pay for their own moderation by generating revenue in the same way YouTubes users do.
cbozeman 5y ago
> YT is too vastly big for that. No it's not, it's our society that's fucked. It's our CEOs' legal requirement of fiduciary responsibility that causes these problems. YouTube was 10.9% of Google's revenue for the year 2020, with something around $19,770,000,000 of income. How many employees could Google hire to manually investigate and take action against users? Even 10% of that income to address this problem would hire literally tens of thousands of people to tackle the issue. The "problem" with Big Tech is that they're convinced of their own intelligence and they all believe they can automate their way to Utopia. Well you can't. You're not that smart. You're not that wise. You need bodies on the ground, you need hands doing work. We may get there some day, but it won't be today, tomorrow, ten years from now, and it may not even be a hundred years from now. A little painful hubris in the form of some of these enormous social media platforms collapsing not under their own weight, but under their own arrogance in the form of thinking they can automate their problems away, would be a good dose of medicine sorely needed.

koofdoof 5y ago

Hacker News at least somewhat shows when a comment's net_votes is negative by fading the visibilty out. Which is kind of the exact opposite of YouTube's new system, showing only negative responses vs only positive responses.

_____-___ 5y ago
Yeah, HN shows the net_votes, YouTube is now only showing upvotes, so the person you're replying to is wrong here. It's not the same since HN's showing what people think of the comment, vs YouTube only showing people who liked the content. Not saying it couldn't be better, it's just a flawed comparison.

paulpauper 5y ago

The problem is voting is that it confirms what views are popular, not what is correct . The assumption that voting can help correct misinformation is probably wrong.

TheMonarchist 5y ago

> The difference between 102+/100- votes and 2+/0- votes is large, but invisible on this site. I wonder whether using a ratio instead of difference would help?

hnbad 5y ago
The main difference is a +102/-100 post is "controversial" whereas a +2/-0 post is not. It's interesting to see both what the "net score" is and how "intense" it is. If by "ratio" you mean showing both the net score and the total number of votes, I guess that would be one way to solve this. But a single ratio score (i.e. net score divided by total number of votes) is probably just going to look weird and useless.
- TheMonarchist 5y ago
  I was thinking of something like (upvotes+1) / (downvotes+1). Adding 1 to denominator is necessary to avoid division by 0. Adding it to numerator too balances it out and makes varying number of downvotes visible in spite of 0 upvotes. Controversial posts would get a score near 1 instead of fluctuating. You would also get a rough idea of intensity as more ratios become possible when the number of votes increases. I think it's still simple enough to be transparent to most users.
bradbeattie 5y ago
Didn't we just have a conversation about how not to average things? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29200103 The same principle could be applied to upvotes/downvotes too, yeah?

justsomeuser 5y ago

I agree. I think the most valuable comments are the ones which have a balance of a large amount of "up" and "down" votes. Those are not just "upvote if you agree with this positive sentiment", but often giving valid reasons against someones opinion.

soheil 5y ago

Having a functionality and then removing it is very different than never having it in the first place.