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HN's vote count is not public, and negative count is capped at -4 so you can't downvote someone into oblivion.
by Andrew_nenakhov 4y ago
HN's vote count is not public, and negative count is capped at -4 so you can't downvote someone into oblivion.
- amadeuspagel 4y agoMost social networks don't have an equivalent to downvotes at all.
- mikrl 4y agoI think this might be structurally related to our political ideology of liberal democracy. We assume that bad takes die out or are overcome by good takes in the marketplace of ideas. Therefore, the ‘magnitude’ of a bad take should intuitively be close to 0, and the magnitude of a good take should be positive and nonzero. Allowing negative scores permits bad takes to become large in magnitude. Allowing or disallowing downvotes is basically just scaling the distribution of magnitude of takes since bad takes will sit closer to zero than good takes in general, even if they cannot be downvoted.
- ilyt 4y agoBut lack of downvotes mixes "just average takes not worth a upvote" with "this guy is obviously a moron, why I'm even seeing his comments together with other competent people?"
- amadeuspagel 4y agoThat's why upvotes and downvotes should be shown separately.
- doublerabbit 4y agoI feel the better approach would be where if you wish to downvote you must give a reason for the downvote. This would eliminate the snowball effect.
- ilyt 4y ago...that nobody would read. I think the usual "just don't show score for few minutes"/"don't show score that's only a bit negative" does the job well enough.
- crazygringo 4y agoWhen -4 pushes you to the very bottom of the page in text so grayed-out that it's not even readable unless you highlight it first, I'd still call that oblivion. Also, flags from just two (?) people remove your comment entirely.
- poszlem 4y agoYeah, as much as I don't want it to be true, HN algorithm is one of the harshest I've seen in terms of allowing people to hide/remove unpopular opinions. Some people think it's a feature not a bug though. I am not one of those people. It's definitely "an elegant system for a more civilized age". Not for whatever you call the internet in 2023.
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoI've seen my comments come back from -4, and being flagged. Apparently, 'unflag' action cancels one 'flag' action. Thus, local oblivion is not irrecoverable.
- crazygringo 4y agoAs far as I know, there is no such thing as an 'unflag' option. I've heard of the existence of a 'vouch' option, but supposedly it only appears on [dead] comments, not the merely downvoted/flagged-into-oblivion. And of course [dead] comments are hidden entirely by default.
- Zak 4y agoDoes your account not have vouch? It has enough karma that I would expect it to.
- Zak 4y agoI think the weight of flags varies by account. I'm not sure if it's just karma that affects it, or some other information that's not visible to us.