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A HN post with negative points – how?
- helsinkiandrew 5mo agoNow upvoted, but it was negative
- rzmmm 5mo agoHN has downvotes but you need to have enough karma to access the feature.
- tux3 5mo agoDownvotes on comments need a little bit of karma. Now downvotes on submissions, those are not normally doable by random users.
- bryanrasmussen 5mo agoright, I have reasonably high karma and I can't downvote submissions, although I can flag them.
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agoYea you can't downvote submissions. Now, the post linked itself has been upvoted so it doesn't have negative submissions but it seems to have had been the case. I don't quite understand how posts can have negative points :-/ A hunch but maybe a post which got confused as comment id of some other comment which got downvoted so you had negative karma, but I am unsure of this spooky action at a distance. It would be really interesting to know the reason behind it.
- GaryBluto 5mo agoPerhaps some kind of auto-downranking system used for moderation of specific topics or thigns (without explicitly removing them) that accidentally targeted said post? Just idle speculation.
- kotaKat 5mo agowhich is weird, because normally they just ratelimit you to oblivion and back - not even allow the post in the first place. or just set you to be automatically dead. unless this is just a glitch of early ranking to get posts onto frontpage that posts start with an invisible negative amount of points and get upvoted out of new and the invisible negatives to frontpage? (eg all posts start out with some value of negative points between -10 and 0 or something and the new votes will help nudge it out to the frontpage?)
- pavon 5mo agoSeeing as how HN normally automatically strips "how" out of a title such that "How I Journal" becomes "I Journal", having both "how" and "why" in the title may have been just too much for the modbot to handle on a Tuesday morning.
- Unai 5mo agoThat's correct AFAIK, submissions can't be downvoted. If anyone's interested, here's a list of undocumented HN features/rules (although I don't know how up to date it is): https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- hrak0 5mo ago[flagged]
- ramon156 5mo ago-5 now! Made it -4 for you Although negative profiles have always been a thing. You cannot easily downvote submissions, in fact I'm not even sure if you can.
- paulnpace 5mo agoHN has the oddest karma system. I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote.
- helsinkiandrew 5mo ago> I've seen submissions get 3 upvotes in the first minute and never another upvote. Is that people looking at the new page and seeing/upvoting your post and then it falls off the front.
- paulnpace 5mo agoThat is many people's posts when I am reviewing new submissions.
- svara 5mo agoThat's probably the submitter's friends voting.
- paulnpace 5mo agoIt has happened to me and I'm not coordinating with anyone. I have also experienced very rapidly upvoted submissions flagged, then I notified HN admins, had the post unflagged, but after that time it was deep past page 12 and got like 5 more votes over 24 hours. I haven't seen the negative votes on submissions that people are reporting within this submission, but anyone who thinks HN isn't a target for myriad bad actors employing every means available to them to manipulate votes in whatever direction is a fool.
- yuppiepuppie 5mo agoIve been curating HN Arcade for a few months now. One thing I noticed is the vast amount of ShowHN games that get 5 karma points. I was thinking this was some sort of boosting system that low karma ShowHN posts get.
- OuterVale 5mo agoOriginal poster of the thread here. Doesn't appear to be negative anymore, but here is what it looked like: https://vale.rocks/micros/20260512-0652 https://vale.rocks/micros/20260512-0652 Screenshot was taken at 06:50 UTC.
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo agoDo you have any idea on what caused it? https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663 https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=48104663 This seems to have gone to -10 and then went up according to this, which matches what your comment had said that you were seeing -10 on your android. Edit: (actually it had gone all the way to -15) and seems that this website has been still stuck at -8 upvotes at the moment of this comment and this link has also been the proof for me to finally see/confirm this as the submission now has positive upvotes.
- OuterVale 5mo agoIt is hardly a satisfying answer, but I haven't the foggiest what caused it. I submitted it the same as I've submitted many other submissions in the past.
- aaron695 5mo agoA guess would be it got a story flag -4 points. Then something happened that overrode the show score, which is not the same as the real score for stories. Like you did a edit? (after it got one flag, which would not be seen) (Random guess) [Edit] Up votes wouldn't change it until it got back to zero since -3 is not valid. The external -10 might be too many comments with a low score is not good
- hans-l 5mo agoMaybe there is an API to downvote posts and some bots found it? Edit: Actually I would wager that it’s some kind of automatic downvoting when the system detects bad votes or comments. Something like “friends shouldn’t vote”. Since we see voting on posts and not comments we could see it go negative.
- nomilk 5mo agoWhen I click on 'A HN post with negative points – how?' from the HN homepage (currently ranked 12 for me), it goes to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663 instead of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316 (I found the latter via google search for the title string) I suspect the same is happening for some others too, based on the comments on that article. Bizarre! Update: 2 minutes later and the link from the hn home page now correctly leads to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106316 Never seen that happen before.
- sebastianmestre 5mo agoThis post you are commenting on (*6316) is a link post that points to the other one (*4663) The normal behavior for link posts in HN is that the title takes you to the link address, not to the post address. To enter the post address, you need to hit the "discuss"/"x comments" button. So, what you describe is HN working as expected AFAICT, it's just a bit counterintuitive because it's an HN post linking to another, which is uncommon
- tomschwiha 5mo agoHere is a self referencing HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33130986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33130986
- madibo3156 5mo agoPointers are hard
- edu 5mo agoThis post has been added as a link, instead of a comment one. Then when you click on it you go the linked page. LGTM
- Bender 5mo agoSomeone should email dang as that would be a bug or a fundamental design change or a site compromise. hn@ycombinator.com
- Bender 5mo agoEmailed him shortly after this comment.
- nathanmills 5mo agoSomeone? Who are we going to choose?
- throwanem 5mo agoYou needn't; I just did. Mr. Gackle isn't really all that frightening, you know. There's no need to fear talking with him.
- bookofjoe 5mo agoIn fact he's the opposite of frightening.
- throwanem 5mo agoTrue, but it's rude to call that out, not to mention rather more arrogant than wise. These are trepidatory times, and like many, his job is not at all secure. In his shoes I'd be frightened too, and he displays reasonable grace in spite of it; I have done less well at times.
- bookofjoe 5mo agoFirst time something I've posted here has been characterized as rude; I will try to do better in the future.
- pwdisswordfishs 5mo ago
- notepad0x90 5mo agoKarma systems in general are opaque. The assumed or advertised behavior is never fully accurate, if it was, it would be all too easy to game.
- 1970-01-01 5mo agoBots. I've posted many popular and unpopular takes here. Down always comes first, and as the bot votes evap into the ether, the true human take is almost always revealed after an hour or two.
- hoppyhoppy2 5mo agoAs stated elsewhere in this discussion: downvotes exist for comments on HN, but not for submissions, as far as anyone is aware, which is what makes it puzzling.
- 1970-01-01 5mo ago[flagged]
- whilenot-dev 5mo agoUsers aren't in agreement of the needed karma threshold for the downvote button to appear on submissions, though. There seems to be a way through URL-params, as mentioned in another comment[0], but I'd consider that method an auth-related bug, rather than an existing downvote feature for submissions. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48107572
- 1970-01-01 5mo agoWhatever it is, the bots learned it and they actively exploit it, hence this entire post.
- nickthegreek 5mo agoThen they should show us a screenshot of the interface that allows it.
- ThrowawayR2 5mo agoAccording to tomhow, there isn't and there isn't going to be one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46298942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46298942
- gchamonlive 5mo agoTake this post for instance, the link to the upvote is https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=48106316&how=up&auth=2621918f523b7026c43d71c8f547b7483394ef59&goto=item%3Fid%3D48106316 https://news.ycombinator.com/vote?id=48106316&how=up&auth=26... If you change `how=up` to `how=down` it downvotes the post. I tried it once, didn't change the vote count, but I issued the inverse operation with `how=un` and the vote count went up, so I'm guessing someone upvoted at the same time I downvoted. That or it doesn't really work like it says it does, but it does respond with a 301 followed by an OK, so I think this works.
- 1970-01-01 5mo agoThis.
- LocalH 5mo agoI tried this and had no change with either down or the subsequent un, using my own upvote link's token. Perhaps someone coincidentally upvoted the post at the same time you attempted to undown the submission, rather than upvoting when you attemped to downvote it.
- gchamonlive 5mo agoGood to know! So the hypothesis is false.
- benoau 5mo agoI bet some anti-spam measure was inadvertently tripped that dampened the submission popularity, while a bug failed to conceal it.
- s20n 5mo agoOP should have archived the page when the count was negative. Here's a snapshot from when the count was 0 https://web.archive.org/web/20260512115623/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104663 https://web.archive.org/web/20260512115623/https://news.ycom...
- lifeisstillgood 5mo agoAs I understand it, -4 is the lowest you can get (basically everyone hates your point of view), so you may have found a bug but more likely found 5 or so people who don’t like you quicker than expected! I have seen (my) posts bounce up and down so there I suspect there is a lot of Voting going on compare to actual movement. But in the end HN is biased for positivity (as you cannot go lower than -4) But someone with sight of codebase might have more useful comments
- john_strinlai 5mo agothe interesting part here is that it is a submission with negative karma, not a comment. there is no downvote button on submissions, so it doesnt make sense for it to get negative karma.
- jermaustin1 5mo agoI always assumed there WAS downvoting for a submission once you hit a certain threshold of user karma. Like flagging and other community moderating functions.
- mplanchard 5mo agoI have not hit it yet, if there is one. Only options are upvoting, flagging, etc.
- MBCook 5mo agoSame. Maybe flags count as -1 after enough?
- fortran77 5mo agoYes there is.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- shevy-java 5mo agoOn HN I almost never downvote. On reddit this was different. Not sure why but I feel that on HN karma is so much harder to get that I don't want to be an obstacle. On reddit I could more easily downvote. It also was easier to get karma. (Reddit is annoying with regards to its censorship though. That is one arbitrary censorship over there ...)
- nathanmills 5mo agoBut that means more people will get enough karma to be able to downvote, and they likely won't share the same ideals as you so they will downvote more often, making it even harder than it already is for new users.
- kergonath 5mo agoI downvote obvious fallacies and bad faith. And people who fan the flames in a thread. I don’t downvote posts because I disagree with them, but that’s just me. (I don’t upvote because I agree either) Overall, it is common to see greyed posts downvoted for questionable reasons, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dead post that did not deserve it. So overall it seems to work and I avoid overthinking it.
- Der_Einzige 5mo agoThis reminds me, I've wanted to make a bot to automatically upvote the most downvoted posts in a thread with the HN api. I'd call it anti-echochamber.HN or something like that.
- c22 5mo agoI surf with showdead on and often find myself upvoting grey comments that don't seem factually incorrect or rude, perhaps just espousing an unpopular opinion. But man, a lot of grey comments are correctly moderated. I'd leave the most downvoted ones alone for sure.
- distantsounds 5mo agoWhen you press the downvote button, the points decrease. This number can go below zero, into the negatives.
- r721 5mo agodang: >Looks like we have a race condition that someone triggered by using a script to rapidly upvote and then unvote the submission. I'm not sure whether to be grateful or pissed. Perhaps I'll settle on grateful once I've fixed it. >In the meantime, please don't anybody else do this! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114191