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I don’t understand why it’s not possible to downvote posts, I’d have saved someone else from killing his own braincells too by reading this article, instead I c
by lnxg33k1 3y ago
I don’t understand why it’s not possible to downvote posts, I’d have saved someone else from killing his own braincells too by reading this article, instead I could not contribute to the mental health of a fellow specimen, sorry random stranger, not my fault
- catach 3y agoPretty sure it's an HN trope to read some of the comments before the article, in part to get a sense of the quality of the article. So, your duty was done.
- karmakaze 3y agoThis could be a good feature if there's clear guidelines on what's off-topic or undesirable by some criteria. Seems more tricky than downvoting comments which works pretty well for keeping discourse civil as interests and what's interesting is very subjective. I do like systems that have a controverserial section if it doesn't attract content by its own nature.
- Retric 3y agoGiven the option people downvote without reading quickly creating an Ecco chamber. There’s a flag function which serves a similar purpose but the extra effort lets a lot of more marginal content slip through. You want more diverse content because it attracts a more interesting audience. There’s several mechanisms to promote this. “Health risks of travel in early-modern Britain” only has 35 upvotes in the last 6 hours but still ranks #17 because diversity is encouraged. Another story is talking about remnants of a structure dating back “476,000 years and predating the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens” https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2023/09/20/archaeologists-discover-worlds-oldest-wooden-structure/ https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2023/09/20/archaeologists-disco... There both interesting but so is “Fine-grained caching strategies of dynamic queries” etc etc.
- lnxg33k1 3y agoYeah I think it won’t be against diversity, or it is not, just keep diversity within the boundaries of what the overall community would like, I mean, there is nothing about Kim Kardashian, because I suppose it would be too much diversity? Flagging I think helps to shape or better, contain, the diversity?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NicoJuicy 3y agoI don't think anyone cares about Kim Kardashian, except if she actually would have broken the Internet
- dang 3y agoFlags downrank submissions and in that sense work like downvotes. Normally we downweight articles like this but when YC or a YC startup is the story, we err on the side of moderating less - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
- lnxg33k1 3y agoI read dang and thought I was being given another yellow card :look: thanks
- fakedang 3y agoI hate to disagree here Dan, but I tried revisiting this article a while back, and in spite of being posted only 8 hours ago, with a reasonable number of comments and up votes, the discussion was nowhere to be found in the first five pages of HN. That leaves me questioning if what you said actually takes place, or whether there is a mechanism for YC to make sure to sanitize the feed to their preference.
- dang 3y agoWhat you observed is so within the normal range of HN's functioning that there's a FAQ entry dedicated to it: Q: Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer? A: You can't derive rank from votes and time alone. See "How are stories ranked?" above. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html In this case, the post dropped in rank because of user flags.
- chasontherobot 3y agoWhat is wrong with the article? It seemed to be a fairly normal piece, certainly not "braincell killing"