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A year ago, comments that weren't blatantly offensive/crummy/rude/jerkish usually didn't fall below 0 points. The restraint of the community is what encouraged
by thorax 18y ago
A year ago, comments that weren't blatantly offensive/crummy/rude/jerkish usually didn't fall below 0 points. The restraint of the community is what encouraged me to get so involved.
I'm all for downvoting a bad troll or uninvited meme/rickroll-speak much lower, but it kind of hurts to see real comments being modded into unreadably gray negatives for disagreement purposes.
- jonnytran 18y agoI'm not sure what the exact rule is right now, but would it help to simply increase the threshold at which people are allowed to downvote comments?
- gravitycop 18y agowould it help to simply increase the threshold Priviledge thresholds have been periodically increased by the management. However, the process (so far) has been manual. Threshold-increase might instead simply be automated with code that also calculates karma-inflation.
- pg 18y agoGood idea. I just doubled the karma threshold for downvoting (to 100).
- pg 18y agoYeah, I'm probably going to limit negative scores. It's nasty to see people piling on. And seeing nasty things tends to make people nastier.
- netcan 18y agoMaybe give people a downmod quota
- unalone 18y agoI've seen that work in some cases. In other cases it encourages trolls to post enough times that they can't be downvoted more. HN has the flagging system in place, though, so this might be worth a try. The Achewood community gives you more downvotes ('lames') the more upvotes you've received, though that might encourage groupthink.
- TrevorJ 18y agoI've seen behavior on some "other" social news-type sites that suggests that there is a huge psychological gap between 1 and -1 karma on a comment. It seems that the first few downmods on anything greatly increase the likelihood that the comment will get downmodded again because the groupthink factor comes into play. Thankfully, on HN I think we tend to have more independent thinkers so it is somewhat less of an issue.
- mightybyte 18y agoAlong the same lines of the downmod quota suggested in the sibling post, you could make downvotes cost a user some of their karma.