4 ms·

> purposeful distracting comments, The voting system invites this by its very nature. People will try and post early attention grabbing comments that are vague

> purposeful distracting comments, The voting system invites this by its very nature. People will try and post early attention grabbing comments that are vaguely related to the story in order to get lots of upvotes. Plenty of good potential conversations are derailed by, not flame bait (obvious flame bait gets deleted), but, "very engaging" conversations that start off on some tangent that is only the slightly bit related to the story.

JPLeRouzic 3y ago
Yes I have noted that phenomenon, to the point I would be happy to have a HN client that would ignore the first comment its children.
JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
> > People will try and post early attention grabbing comments that are vaguely related to the story in order to get lots of upvotes You sure? Speaking for myself of course but to me the upvotes do nothing , it's about being the author of a comment that sparks a debate between factions and hopefully my faction gets to clear the table on intellectual merit on each and every comment and that has more to do with how elaborate the comment is vs. how many upvotes it receives.
- com2kid 3y ago
  Numbers going up make a certain % of the population behave in strange ways. Some people will go to any lengths to make their imaginary number go up, from asking friends to upvote things (potentially worth $$ if a post for a product hits the HN home page) to writing bot rings to upvote their own posts. Another POV is that the entire point of a karma system is to encourage posters to follow the cultural norms on a site. When I first joined HN, posts that weren't at least a few long paragraphs got almost instantly downvoted. I actually appreciated this as it made for a really nice S/N ratio. It also meant that I didn't post any comments unless I had something substantive to say. So basically the karma system encouraged people to change their behavior in such a way as to contribute to conversations in a non-trivial fashion. Now days I feel that downvotes are used to just penalize super toxic comments. Exceptions do exist, but since the maximum down vote is -4, it is pretty easy for the community to restore the score of a comment that got downvoted to grey because it irritated a few people.

JPLeRouzic 3y ago

Yes I have noted that phenomenon, to the point I would be happy to have a HN client that would ignore the first comment its children.

JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago

> > People will try and post early attention grabbing comments that are vaguely related to the story in order to get lots of upvotes You sure? Speaking for myself of course but to me the upvotes do nothing , it's about being the author of a comment that sparks a debate between factions and hopefully my faction gets to clear the table on intellectual merit on each and every comment and that has more to do with how elaborate the comment is vs. how many upvotes it receives.

com2kid 3y ago
Numbers going up make a certain % of the population behave in strange ways. Some people will go to any lengths to make their imaginary number go up, from asking friends to upvote things (potentially worth $$ if a post for a product hits the HN home page) to writing bot rings to upvote their own posts. Another POV is that the entire point of a karma system is to encourage posters to follow the cultural norms on a site. When I first joined HN, posts that weren't at least a few long paragraphs got almost instantly downvoted. I actually appreciated this as it made for a really nice S/N ratio. It also meant that I didn't post any comments unless I had something substantive to say. So basically the karma system encouraged people to change their behavior in such a way as to contribute to conversations in a non-trivial fashion. Now days I feel that downvotes are used to just penalize super toxic comments. Exceptions do exist, but since the maximum down vote is -4, it is pretty easy for the community to restore the score of a comment that got downvoted to grey because it irritated a few people.